AEW is WWE’s first real fight in decades
It may change the face of professional wrestling in the US
AEW should not be as close as they are right now to WWE, but they are there.
Dave Meltzer
QUEENS, New York: On a Wednesday night in New York City, wrestler Bryan Danielson has a slight grin as he kicks Kenny Omega in the head, drawing a collective “Yes!” from the more than 20,000 fans in a endance. The primal yells inside Arthur Ashe Stadium only get louder with every kick: “Yes! Yes! Yes!”
Soon enough, Omega rebounds and proceeds to knife-edge chop Danielson in the chest so many times that his upper body now resembles a lump of raw, unseasoned ground beef. Both men eventually take to the top rope and throw their bodies at each other, much to the delight of a crowd that knows the fight has only just begun.
If this seems like an ordinarily violent fight in the world of professional wrestling - part athletics, part entertainment - it is also part of a broader ba le playing out between World Wrestling Entertainment, the company that brought America legends like ‘The Rock’ and ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin, and an upstart challenger, All Elite Wrestling.
The match pi ing Danielson, a former WWE legend, against Omega, AEW’s world champion, was the highest-profile one so far for the company, founded less than three years ago, and it was part of AEW’s bet that it could continue to chip away at WWE’s dominance.
“Pro wrestling is awesome, and AEW has rejuvenated me, I’ll tell you that,” said Danielson, 40, “I truly believe that when you show excellent professional wrestling to anyone, they’re going to enjoy it.”
While WWE continues to be the pro wrestling juggernaut in business and pop culture, AEW sees the company as vulnerable. Some fans on podcasts and social media have bemoaned WWE and its chief executive, Vince McMahon, for turning ‘Monday Night Raw’, the company’s flagship show on USA, into a three-hour programme that they say is guilty of being too long and largely predictable. In the process, WWE has lost some of its most gi ed and popular performers – several of whom have found a home in AEW – in favour of trying to find stars who could replicate the kind of mainstream crossover appeal as John Cena and Dave Bautista, who’ve built successful careers in Hollywood.
Led by its own billionaire in Tony Khan – co-owner of the NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars and Fulham FC of the English Football League Championship – AEW has largely gone the opposite direction so far, taking veteran performers known almost exclusively by die-hard fans for their in-ring acumen and giving them time in front of a national audience. Compared to the WWE, which has long promoted outside-the-ring theatrics and trash-talking, AEW emphasises more performance and skill inside the ring.
While fans see both companies as popular alternatives to unscripted combat sports like the Ultimate Fighting Championship, WWE has historically pushed hard into the theatrical aspect of its product. The most recent example is Alexa Bliss, a popular female star whose character has supernatural abilities and a best friend in the form of a demoniclooking doll named Lilly. Both companies use a mix of scripted outcomes and dialogue with improvisational physical combat in the ring.
At AEW, the performers, generally shorter than their WWE counterparts, bring a mix of pro wrestling disciplines from around the world that have been celebrated, from the hardhi ing strong style of Japan to the highflying lucha libre genre in Mexico.
Dave Meltzer, the longtime wrestling historian and journalist with the Wrestling Observer, said in an interview that AEW’s campaign to become the alternative to WWE has ushered in ‘the most interesting and exciting time in pro wrestling’ since 1999. The late 1990s brought what’s known as the industry’s ‘A itude Era’ for megastars and increased violence and sexual content, which were shown to be highly effective in luring larger audiences.
“AEW should not be as close as they are right now to WWE, but they are there,” said Meltzer, whose newsle er has estimated AEW’s market value to already be about US$400 million. “Most people in the TV business would say Vince’s philosophy is a be er one than Tony’s, so this is truly an experiment to see whether wrestling can be different from what WWE has done.”
WWE declined to comment. AEW, which has mostly emerged during the coronavirus pandemic, faces multiple challenges. Most of the stars at the top of the card are White, and fans have clamoured for the female performers to get more screen time.
Khan, 39, said the company is aware of the criticisms but is confident where it’s heading. “I don’t think you’ll ever please every wrestling fan, but if you can make most of the fans happy most of the time, then you’ll have a great fan base,” he said.
Though the television contracts are just below those of professional sports leagues in the US, the money spent on broadcasting pro wrestling is serious. AEW is in the middle of a US$175 million television deal with WarnerMedia to air matches on ‘Dynamite’ and ‘Rampage’ twice a week on TNT, before moving to TBS next year.
WWE, which has been run by the McMahon family for decades, came to terms with Peacock, NBCUniversal’s streaming platform, on an exclusive rights deal for the WWE Network in January reportedly valued at more than US$1 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal. Its multiyear television deals with Fox Sports and USA Networks are at close to US$470 million annually, more than triple the amount of the previous TV agreement.
It is a daunting climb, but AEW has had some successes. While WWE mostly has a headlock on TV ratings, AEW recently defeated ‘Raw’ in consecutive weeks in the coveted 18-to-49 TV demographic. Khan said the success of the company’s ‘All Out’ pay-per-view over Labor Day weekend, which earned the most sales in AEW history, ‘ignited the passion of wrestling fans worldwide’.
“That passion has been within the fans all along,” Khan said. “The fans were just looking for an outlet to express it.”
The optimism has been due, in part, to marquee signings of some of the biggest and best performers of the past decade, including Danielson and Adam Cole. One of those big-ticket acquisitions is CM Punk, real name Phil Brooks, who le WWE in 2014 in an acrimonious dispute over medical treatment he received from a company doctor.
Punk, who did not respond to an interview request, has said that AEW’s business identity as a professional wrestling company was what persuaded the 43-yearold to put on the tights and boots again. “We’re the punk rock band that used to play at your bowling alley,” he recently told Sports Illustrated. “It has that spirit and love of the art. It’s a place where you can make a living and learn the cra .”
Some in WWE are dismissive of AEW. WWE Universal champion Roman Reigns, real name Joe Anoa’i, said in an interview with Complex that he did not see “real competition [with AEW] because I think their fan base legitimately is a hardcore fan base.”
“So there’s like a ceiling and a built-in ground to that viewership,” Reigns said to Complex, adding that WWE is “trying to connect with everyone.”
At the Queens episode of ‘Dynamite’, a massive number of people wearing CM Punk Tshirts were connecting with the legend.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve been in New York City,” Punk barks at the crowd. The fans erupt into the familiar chant of “C-M-Punk!” as one sign in the lower bowl stands out amid the sea of humanity: “I got vaccinated 4 CM Punk.”
He briefly pauses before landing a shot of his own at WWE, which has long had a stranglehold on the Big Apple: “It’s been an even longer time since professional wrestling has been in New York City!
AEW’s pro wrestling rebellion comes as WWE remains the industry’s dominant business force. Though WWE’s TV ratings are nowhere near where they were in the late 1990s and early 2000s when millions tuned in each week, the company has managed to make more money while being not as popular in traditional media, in large part because of its worldwide TV and media deals. The public company has also tried to improve its image a er accusations of sexism in the portrayal of female wrestlers and shi ed its programming from a TV-14 rating to TV-PG.
But some have been turned off by the company’s mistakes, including the mass firing of dozens of popular wrestlers during the pandemic in 2020 and 2021; streaming issues on Peacock; and the company’s lucrative and long-term business relationship with Saudi Arabia continuing a er the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a contributing columnist to The Washington Post. Its most recent event in Saudi Arabia, ‘Crown Jewel’, was on Oct. 21.
WWE President Nick Khan – no relation to Tony Khan – said to BT Sport in August that the company was going away from signing independent-circuit performers and prioritising young athletes with li le to no pro wrestling experience who could be moulded into its style.
This is similar to a record label shying away from recruiting unsigned bands that have strong followings in favour of creating their own handpicked pop groups. The acknowledgment prompted Tony Khan to tweet a not-so-subtle dig at WWE, without naming it, about how ‘professional wrestling is an art form’.
“You don’t create great artists by training them all to paint by numbers in the same way,” he wrote.
The sentiment is echoed by Bri Baker, an AEW original and the women’s champion.
“I don’t think pu ing a bunch of models and athletes off the street in a warehouse and teaching them all to do the same thing the same way at the same time is going to create a successful roster,” said Baker, 30, who is also a dentist. “People learn differently and they have different strengths and weaknesses, and sometimes you have to find out what those are on your own.”
From the time World Championship Wrestling, the former top-rated pro wrestling company, went under and was subsequently bought by WWE in spring 2001, McMahon and the federation synonymous with sports entertainment have lived in a world free of real competition in the US.
“I own my own competition,” McMahon, as his on-screen character, boasted at the start of ‘Raw’ on March 26, 2001, from Cleveland.
Several companies in the US tried and failed to dislodge WWE. But abroad, wrestling leagues were thriving, o en involving a diversity of talent styles, AEW’s Kahn said.
Khan, who has been a fan since he was a kid growing up in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, was considering what it would take to build a serious WWE competitor. Khan had contacted Ma Jackson, who along with his brother Nick perform as the Young Bucks, about starting a new company. A sold-out event in Chicago in 2018 put on by the Jacksons and Cody Rhodes, another former WWE talent, gave Khan confidence that there was room for a competitor.
“It was such a big movement that it clearly could be mobilised and become something more mainstream,” he said. “It had the bones of a wrestling revolution.”
The pitch to WarnerMedia, which had not televised pro wrestling since WCW collapsed, was straightforward: Khan said he wanted to make a TV programme “for the fans who are not ge ing what they wanted, the fans who wanted to see more pro wrestling . . . and less nonsensical stuff.”
Khan knew he needed a large investment if he was to make his teenage dream into a feasible business, so he turned to his father, Shahid Khan, a Pakistani immigrant and self-made auto parts entrepreneur.
“I absolutely didn’t think this was a good idea,” the elder Khan told Forbes in June. “But I told Tony, ‘Look, when I’m dead and gone, I’m going to be leaving you and your sister a lot of money. Why don’t you blow some of that while I’m alive?’ “
“There’s something about making content with the fan in mind that’s so fulfilling, and Tony has done just that,” said Bre Weitz, the general manager for TNT, TBS and truTV. “More wrestling is good for all of pro wrestling.”
Just a few months a er the premiere, AEW found itself having to operate during a pandemic.
Somehow, Tony Khan said, producing shows in front of few or no fans in their home base of Jacksonville proved beneficial to the company because it helped level the playing field with WWE, which had struggled to perform without fan interaction.
“The pandemic made it more obvious who was putting more time into the stories, and who was trying to put on more quality national television,” Khan said.
The difference in performance style was crystallised throughout the pandemic. WWE’s in-ring style focuses on a slower pace in the action that can benefit big matches but make other competitions on its weekly shows feel uninspired and plodding. In comparison, AEW tends to give fans a mix of slow and fast, with more top-rope offence, innovative move sets and kicks to the face that look and sound like they mean it.
At WWE, it’s about memorising lines for talking segments centred around the fight. At AEW, it’s more about giving performers one or two things to mention and le ing them improvise with what’s on their mind.
The in-ring product got the a ention of Danielson, the WWE legend. He always lived ‘a very selfish life’ as a professional wrestler, he said, but fatherhood made him reevaluate things.
With a new purpose and outlook, he saw a fresh challenge in AEW. He knew his new employer did not necessarily need him just for his wrestling talent. They needed him for his star power, he said.
“My purpose in AEW is something completely different than it was in WWE. I really felt like AEW didn’t need me,” he said, laughing. “My purpose is to get more eyeballs on this already awesome product.”