In 2019, Tony Khan kicked off All Elite Wrestling alongside his Executive Vice Presidents and became a pro wrestling booker without any prior professional experience, and somehow the fledgling promotion was spoken of in the same conversations as WWE. Despite this, Khan's booking has been criticized by both fans and wrestling veterans alike, but six years into the industry, he believes he's grown as a booker.
"I put the shows together and this year, I feel like, I've been especially hands-on about every episode, every segment, the way I was at Daily's Place in the Pandemic," Khan explained during an interview on "The Ariel Helwani Show." Khan then recalled that he vowed to step back and look at booking the way he did early on and decided to stop doing things he knew wouldn't work even after being pressured. "It's like a diet. You do your best to stick to it nobody's perfect but once in a while I might do something against my better judgment; but I kinda told myself: stop doing things against my better judgment."
Despite this, Khan claims he does listen to ideas and again praised those who work closely with him in running AEW. "It's evolving and changing and the one consistent thing is there's one person that does all the shows, and it's me!" he added, noting that across the year, there will never be a single person who attends all AEW's shows other than him.
To further paint the picture of how AEW is run, Tony Khan again brought up that he's helped by many great people back stage, but asserted that unlike everyone else, as the President, he'll be at every show and have an insight nobody else does. "I have great people who could contribute ideas, like, what everybody from Bryan Danielson who's an all-time legend in wrestling but also has some great ideas and different people on the staff," he said. "It's a great group of women and men, but among all them, the only person who goes to every TV is me."
"So, I have a pretty consistent idea of what I'd like to do, but also, whoever's in the room of coaches and staff of that day? I will talk to them," Khan added. Interestingly, he then compared backstage AEW to a scene in "Ghostbusters" where the characters Ray and Winston were driving in a car, which made him always think that they were an unlikely pair but still had to work together, and in AEW this is the case too. "Within every group of people, there's subgroups and that's not always the ones that you think when you see the people walk and stand together," he expressed.
Khan claimed that like the aforementioned scene, he has different people in every show and has a good feel for AEW by now. "I feel like 2025 in particular, we've done a really good job of listening to the fans and putting on a really good show!" Khan added.
If you use any quotes from this article, please credit "The Ariel Helwani Show" and provide a h/t to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription.
