Tony Khan Says Tribalism In Wrestling Isn’t Anything New

The Wednesday Night Wars between WWE and AEW began in October 2019 as AEW Dynamite and NXT went head-to-head every week in order to see who would come out the better show. AEW Dynamite would win in the ratings war for the majority of the time. The Wars finally came to an end in April after NXT moved to Tuesday nights.

Pro wrestling fans especially have been known to be passionate when it comes to defending their favorite promotions. AEW and WWE both have their own passionate fan bases. Unfortunately, some fans can become very toxic when it comes to their views.

Even Renee Paquette previously stated how fans want wrestlers to take a side in the WWE vs AEW war. AEW Champion Kenny Omega also called out the toxic pro wrestling community for the same.

While speaking with Monaco Streaming Film Festival, AEW President Tony Khan talked about tribalism that has been prevalent since AEW’s inception. Tony Khan stated that tribalism is nothing new in pro wrestling. It is simply the matter of technology that helps people express their views more which makes tribalism all the more apparent now.

“There is nothing new [about tribalism], there is nothing new about that. It’s just more widespread than it used to be, but even in the last wrestling boom, online, there was a great amount of this. It was just the medium was very different– there were less people in the chat rooms, the forums. This was all happening on dial up internet for the most part, and there was a huge amount of tribalism back then and I was a part of it. And now I see it, not from the other side but where the battlefield is just much larger. There is much, much bigger of a fanbase online talking about these events, talking about AEW and WWE compared to when I was a kid.

“Now, the companies people probably talk about the most are WWE, AEW, and NJPW. I would say, when I was a kid, it was the WWF, WCW, and ECW. New Japan was a company that worked with WCW a lot but they hadn’t necessarily built as much of a reputation in America where they could stake a claim that they were one of the top 3 companies legitimately. So, that’s pretty interesting. The battlefield on television is very different. There may not be as many linear TV viewers as there were, which is kind of misleading to people, I think, because then they think the wrestling boom isn’t real. The pay-per-views show that it’s real, and really, the TV revenues are what make it real because the TV rights fees are much higher than they ever were.

“That’s what got me into the wrestling business, is the TV rights fees. The reason I plopped down millions and millions of dollars to sign up wrestlers and to build this business plan, it was because TV rights fees justified it. If we could build a hit TV show, which we did, we could command big rights fees to build a company around. So that was the business model. We signed a $175,000,000 four year extension that’s really been one of the key, lifeblood revenue streams of this company. In particular, when live event touring revenue dissipated through the pandemic. That was our key revenue source.”

We will have to see how both companies will improve their product for fans and it is unlikely pro wrestling fans won’t demand others to pick a side. The competition seems to continue despite Vince McMahon not seeing Tony Khan’s company as anywhere close to the competition that WCW was.

h/t to Wrestling Inc for the quotes.

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