Tony Khan Compares AEW Roster To ‘Hallmark Great Roster’ Of 1997 WCW

AEW Dynamite made its debut in October 2019 and since then has worked hard to provide an alternate product to what fans see in WWE. For the most part, they have succeeded, but there is still a lot of room for improvement.

AEW has all the momentum in the world right now thanks to the debut of CM Punk and imminent debut of Daniel Bryan to the company. Punk’s return helped bring back more fans to the product as well.

There is no doubt that AEW has a very deep and diverse roster of talented in-ring performers from all over the world, incorporating various styles of pro wrestling.

While speaking on Busted Open Radio, AEW President Tony Khan compared the current AEW roster to WCW 1997, which was full of veteran stars along with talents who would go on to be future stars.

“I don’t want to compare our roster to anything, ever, but I like to compare our roster sometimes to what I think was the hallmark great roster, which was 1997 WCW where you had all these stars and all this young talent. I really do my best to try to utilize the roster even better than they were when they were a successful company and printing money in 97 and 98. They had a lot of young talent that they didn’t realize and they could have built for the future to help make it a profitable company that they never want to shut down. They could have made it a money-printing machine if they developed the young talent in-house that they had like Chris Jericho, Dean Malenko, Eddie Guerrero, and Rey Mysterio.

I do try to build stars for the future and that’s why you have so many great homegrown stars that are being featured at All Out. There are great opportunities here and I don’t think Jericho, Mysterio, and Guerrero got those same opportunities when they were on a roster with the all-time names like Hulk Hogan, Ric Flair, Randy Savage, and Roddy Piper. What a great TV business they built with that roster that unfortunately didn’t last, but I think would have lasted longer if they had built the young stars the way I try to do,”

Tony Khan also recently boasted that AEW made the pro wrestling business hotter. We will have to wait and see how many talents Tony Khan will keep on signing to AEW in the coming months.

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h/t to Fightful for the quotes.