In an interview with Mike Johnson of PWInsider.com, AEW President Tony Khan addressed fan feedback and criticism from social media. Here is what Khan said:
“Now sometimes – some things are just nature setting in. There are times where people are impatient and I get that, sometimes there are things in wrestling that you have to wait for and I don’t think people have the attention span they used to have, so there are times where people are eager to see something, they just don’t want to wait, and I get that. Doing a storyline where Sting sat in the rafters for a year without wrestling in 1997 would be very difficult to pull off now with social media. I think if Eric [Bischoff] had tried to do that now people would be a lot more critical of it today because people would be like, ‘When the hell is Sting going to wrestle?’ I found that out when I tried to hold Sting off for a couple of months building to a Sting match, I thought it would be much more manageable but because of social media, people were much more eager to see Sting get back in the ring.
But as far as some of the criticisms of segments, I take a lot of that to heart and follow what people are saying online pretty closely, because a lot of times, the fans…why wouldn’t you want to listen to the fans? The greatest feedback we have in the world is from the wrestling fans, because unlike in other sports where the fans are yelling something at you and it’s too late, they’re yelling, ‘Catch the ball,’ it’s over, you didn’t, it’s too late. You can yell at the guy but he didn’t catch it. In wrestling it’s not like that, because a lot of times you can put the toothpaste back in the tube, you can fix something, and that is what makes wrestling very special. It’s one of the reasons I love it so much because there are opportunities to go back if you make a mistake and fix them. I do take a lot of that stuff to heart.”
