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Booking a wrestling show is hard. WWE has an entire creative team dedicated to it and they still seem to give up about halfway through Raw every Monday. In AEW, all of the booking comes down to one man: Tony Khan. And Khan has to work hard to stay on top of all the wrestlers he keeps hiring after WWE releases them because they can’t come up with anything creative for them to do!
In an interview with Tony Khan on TSN, who definitely dropped the ball by publishing the interview in one piece instead of breaking every single topic covered by Khan into an individual clickbait article that could supply the site with clicks for days, the AEW owner detailed the struggles of trying to keep all those newly signed wrestlers and longtime wrestlers busy.
Trying to keep as many people involved as possible means very hard choices. I spend a lot of time thinking about it and there’s a lot of great minds, great coaches here [doing the same] and a lot of people to keep in mind for spots that are available because it’s such a huge roster of great pro wrestlers.
Yeah, well… you could always stop hiring new wrestlers every two weeks, Tony. Just sayin’! He continued:
We try to do it as much as possible and it’s so important to me. I spend so many hours a week thinking about how to do that without oversaturating Dynamite, Rampage, and our pay-per-views. We have other great vehicles – of course, the “forbidden door” allows for people to go wrestle in other companies, but we also have our own AEW programming that hundreds of thousands of people watch every week on YouTube with AEW Dark and Dark: Elevation on Mondays and Tuesdays.
Streaming has also helped us find new stars, identify, train and get experience for people who have become regulars who are featured on television like Powerhouse Hobbs or finding The Acclaimed separately and putting them together – Max Caster and Anthony Bowens had never teamed – and refining that act and developing that entrance with Caster rapping and Anthony with that signature line. There’s Red Velvet and a number of other people who have come though AEW Dark and have made the company even stronger and continue to have that pipeline of both veterans and younger, developing talent on Dark and Dark: Elevation in addition to the three hours of TV we have and occasional specials like the Battle of the Belts hourly specials and our quarterly pay-per-views.
Do you think Tony Khan is doing a good enough job managing the ever-growing AEW roster. Let us know what you think in the comments. Or don’t. We aren’t going to read what you say anyway.