A former member of the AEW roster recently detailed the biggest problems with Tony Khan and his approach to leading and booking the upstart professional wrestling promotion.
AEW has done many good things for the professional wrestling industry. The company has offered a legitimate alternative to WWE in the market. They have helped to greatly increase wrestler pay and given performers another major option in free agency. And AEW has also shown that opening the forbidden door can be good for business.
Unfortunately, the last couple of years have revealed major flaws in the company’s product and the style of CEO and co-founder Tony Khan. Ratings have dropped dramatically and ticket sales have plummeted compared to the demand AEW saw just a couple of years ago.
It has made many around the industry question if Khan is the right person to lead the company on a creative level from week to week. During a recent conversation with “Busted Open Radio,” former AEW talent Frankie Kazarian added more fuel to the growing debate.
“That whole first year, the whole on-sale date, the announcement in Jacksonville, the press conference in Vegas, the first Double or Nothing, all of that was excitement because it was new and it was fresh and it was like, wow, the possibilities are out there, and that was all very positive and stuff I still look back on fondly,” Kazarian recalled. “The negative stuff; just ultimately the lack of leadership. Inmates running the asylum in a way. No real direction.
“There were stories that were presented. ‘We’ll do this, this, this and this.’ Okay, but after that, what are you gonna do?” he added. “That was always a problem. It was always, ‘Oh, I have a story for three weeks.’ Then what? That’s why I think angles are dropped so quickly and I just ultimately think, a lack of leadership is; in this business, you need that guy. That guy with the pencil where the buck stops and I don’t necessarily think that’s the case there.
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Kazarian also claimed that he believes the company benefited from a great deal of goodwill. Probably from dissatisfaction with the WWE product at the time. Obviously, WWE has gotten on a hot streak while AEW’s goodwill has seemingly disappeared over the last year.
