Tony Khan Claims He Doesn’t Want To Train Wrestlers From Scratch In AEW

AEW President Tony Khan is famous for quite a few reasons. Those include both good and bad reasons, but his love for professional wrestling is never under question. He also made an interesting claim recently, because unlike WWE who likes to train talent from the ground up, TK isn’t about that life.

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. The company keeps on signing more talented pro wrestlers as well.

While speaking on the Swerve City podcast, Tony Khan talked about what he looks for in a talent, when he is scouting. Khan then claimed that he doesn’t want to train wrestlers from scratch in AEW.

“Well, there’s a lot of things. First of all, when you look at their body of work coming in, sometimes you get athletes, like Satnam Singh is a great example or Jade Cargill, where they didn’t have prior experience in pro wrestling, but they were great athletes, actually both of them played basketball at a high level. I thought they were worth a gamble.

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We typically don’t take people in who don’t have a lot of prior wrestling experience. We don’t train wrestlers from scratch here. It’s a different business model. There are a lot of great people, but for us, we kind of pick our spots when it comes to that thing, because we’re not as much about centralized training all week long.

We come together like locusts in a different city every week and then we go our separate ways. I think for us, having a lot of prior wrestling experience is really important.

So for example Swerve is somebody I’d seen wrestle in different promotions and I really loved your stuff. I had seen a lot of your matches before you came in. Some other people might not have as much experience as you and might not have had as much success, or really might not be as far along or as developed or as good.

There are other people where it’s hard to track them down.“

Tony Khan also stated that it is a challenge to fit so many AEW stars on television every week. AEW will likely continue bringing in anyone Khan wants to see in his ring. We will have to wait and see what the company has planned for their talent in the coming weeks.

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