Tony Khan was recently interviewed in advance of Double or Nothing. During the interview, he discussed if he considers AEW to be competition to the WWE as well as how “All In” led to the formation of AEW. Here are the highlights:
On Competing With The WWE:
No, no, no! And I told you last year when I was first thinking of doing this that there’s a great business case for this. And I laid it out, and you’re the perfect person to make the case to because you are somebody who grew up loving wrestling. And you hadn’t watched much wrestling for a little while. Occasionally you would go out and check in, but you were what I would call a lapsed wrestling fan, effectively … What AEW’s got, we’ve got the best wrestlers in the world, the best in-ring performers. But we don’t have until now, a platform where anybody besides WWE which has really, really great distribution in a lot of places. Now we’re getting distribution in places all over the world where we’re getting, you know, as good or better distribution in many of the biggest markets. So when you say like, taking on, I don’t see it like that because I just want more wrestling for everybody. I think that the more wrestling people watch, the better. And I don’t try and discourage people from watching wrestling, and we don’t discourage people from wearing other wrestling company’s shirts to our shows for that matter.
Cody Rhodes, the young Bucks had never done a show on television as a group, as a wrestling promotion. Yet they were able to draw over 11,000 people to a show they did in suburban Chicago just on basically viral promotion and word of mouth, and through the love of wrestling that they spread. The kind of people that came to their show were some of the most rabid, passionate fans you’ll ever see. And it was a really, really exciting experience. I was there and it was one of the best shows I’ve ever been to. When they became available to work for somebody else, I was there with a business case, with a business plan, and an idea that we could produce a show that was going to be available weekly. And that we could recreate what was a better time to be a wrestling fan in many ways.”
Double or Nothing’s going to be, in my opinion, one of the greatest PPCs in wrestling history. And I know something about it in that I’m very familiar with what we’re planning for Double or Nothing, and I’ve seen every PPV in wrestling history. [laughs] We’ve got some great announcements still about the card to build interest … there’s gonna be some surprises.
Credit: AEW. H/T 411Mania.
