AEW President Tony Khan recently appeared on the Le Batard and Friends program to discuss a wide range of topics, most notably how he believes the wrestling industry has gotten hotter since AEW launched back in 2019. Hear Khan’s full thoughts on the subject below.
How the wrestling business has gotten hotter since AEW launched:
The wrestling business has gotten hotter as a result of the launch of AEW, and I think a lot of the stuff I said in year one was validated through the way we carried ourselves on the launch of Dynamite and through the pandemic. I tried to do the right things by a lot of people through the pandemic, whether it was not executing mass layoffs and letting all my people go when we lost all the ticket revenue, and I ate those costs personally and then you look at what we did in terms of AEW Elevation and before that AEW Dark, those shows on YouTube through the summer was the home of so many independent wrestlers.
Outlasting the pandemic and remaining on television during that time:
And when independent wrestling was shut down, the only paying gig was Dark, and it was the best of both worlds because it was a chance to go out and make some money and have a chance to get the exposure on the internet for hundreds of 1000s of people on YouTube. There’s really only a couple companies that were running in the pandemic. There’s only two big wrestling companies in America, frankly, but on national television. But at the same time, there are a lot of wrestling companies that are pretty good size that weren’t really able to run, to have TV. Before we came along, there was really only one company that had that huge national penetration on a mainstream station, and now we have multiple shows. It’s very different from where we launched but during the pandemic, really taking care of these people, providing a home for independent wrestlers.
(H/T and transcribed by Wrestling Inc.)