Tony Khan started All Elite Wrestling along with Cody Rhodes, Kenny Omega and Young Bucks in 2019. At the time, Khan had signed several released superstars from WWE to the company and nobody complained about it.
However, Khan signed plenty of independent and former WWE wrestlers in the past several months. For that, he received a huge backlash from fans and even wrestling personalities. Most recently, a wrestler name Shane Taylor made his AEW debut on last week’s Rampage and he confronted Keith Lee.
In a recent interview with Battleground Podcast, AEW President Tony Khan explained the reason why he continues signing wrestlers to the company. Khan said that he wants to introduce new faces to the fans just like WCW did in the 90s.
“There are fans who have never seen Shane Taylor before, and that’s okay. You get introduced to new faces all the time. When I was a young wrestling fan, that was one of the things I liked about WCW Nitro. I think it would be very ironic now that the same promoter [Eric Bischoff] would tell you, you don’t want to see these faces or introduce new people on TV because they were the ones who did that. A lot of times these new faces or read in a magazine, I’d never seen before and they would just walk out and wrestle on Nitro like it was perfectly natural and I thought it was the coolest thing.
I guess that’s not acceptable anymore even though its much much easier to access information on the internet than it was in 1996,” he said You saw wrestlers coming in from all promotions in the 90s on Nitro. Wrestlers coming to TBS or TNT is nothing new. People complaining about it ad nauseam on the internet is certainly new. At the end of the day, you want to listen to what the fans are saying. Overall, there has been a positive reception to a lot of international wrestlers coming to AEW.”
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