Tony Khan Defends AEW Constantly Debuting New Stars

AEW President Tony Khan loves the professional wrestling business and his passion for the industry is genuine. He has done a lot for his company, but not everything has been received well by fans. This includes constantly debuting new talent on the roster.

On last week’s episode of AEW Rampage, Shane Taylor made his AEW debut, confronting his former partner Keith Lee and setting up a match for ROH Final Battle.

AEW has debuted several stars over the past few months, and some fans have mocked the company for this. While speaking on the Battleground podcast, Tony Khan talked about Taylor’s debut. Khan made it clear that he is surprised fans are complaining about new talent debuting in AEW.

“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.

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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.”

Judging by what Tony Khan said, it is highly unlikely AEW will stop debuting new stars every few months anytime soon. Regardless, fans have simply gotten used to game-changing AEW debuts by now.

What’s your take on what Tony Khan said? Sound off in the comments!