AEW President Tony Khan recently appeared on Busted Open Radio to hype up this weekend’s ALL OUT pay per view in Chicago, and discuss his incredibly talented roster, who Khan compares to the WCW roster in its peak year of 1997. Highlights from the interview are below.
Compares the current AEW roster to the 1997 WCW roster:
I don’t want to compare our roster to anything, ever, but I like to compare our roster sometimes to what I think was the hallmark great roster, which was 1997 WCW where you had all these stars and all this young talent. I really do my best to try to utilize the roster even better than they were when they were a successful company and printing money in 97 and 98. They had a lot of young talent that they didn’t realize and they could have built for the future to help make it a profitable company that they never want to shut down. They could have made it a money-printing machine if they developed the young talent in-house that they had like Chris Jericho, Dean Malenko, Eddie Guerrero, and Rey Mysterio.
On building up his young stars for the future:
I do try to build stars for the future and that’s why you have so many great homegrown stars that are being featured at All Out. There are great opportunities here and I don’t think Jericho, Mysterio, and Guerrero got those same opportunities when they were on a roster with the all-time names like Hulk Hogan, Ric Flair, Randy Savage, and Roddy Piper. What a great TV business they built with that roster that unfortunately didn’t last, but I think would have lasted longer if they had built the young stars the way I try to do.
(H/T and transcribed by Fightful)