AEW President Tony Khan made an appearance on the Bloomberg Business of Sports and talked about AEW’s growth in recent months:
“We got a great fanbase and that’s really the star of the show. The wrestling fans make this all possible and we really brought one of the most exciting stars in wrestling into AEW and we’ve also built one of the most exciting young stars in wrestling. So really I feel when it began we introduced a lot of new stars and then I tried to go out and sign top names and bring together one of the best possible roster. It’s a really diverse roster, diverse life experiences, diverse backgrounds and really people of all different ages and experience levels and the star power of the AEW roster is now unparalleled. We have the most star power of any wrestling roster which is not how it started. Really just a lot of elbow grease. Very, very big name stars and really young wrestlers. The depth of the roster and the amount of huge hall of fame stars that we have.”
Khan also commented on AEW being able to compete with WWE:
“In some aspects they’re the market leader but in other aspects we’re now the market leader,” he said. “At the beginning that may have been the case, but there were a lot of reasons that I feel that I could come in and compete. There were a lot of great wrestlers that weren’t being featured on television and there are a lot of wrestling fans out there that were looking for an alternative product that weren’t satisfied with what they were getting on those shows. So I do think there was definitely a great opportunity to come in and compete and I saw some formidability frankly in the market leader at the time and it’s opened up a lot of market shares for us, for me to boot strap a new business and build it up and gain a lot of that market share and we’re now in a lot of significant business markets, we are the worldwide leader.”
