Tony Khan Responds To Criticism Of Introducing New Talent On AEW TV

Tony Khan talks introducing new talent. 

On Friday’s AEW Rampage, Shane Taylor made his AEW debut, confronting his former partner Keith Lee to set up a tag team match at ROH Final Battle. By purchasing Ring of Honor and partnering with various companies like NJPW, AEW has introduced a lot of new talent on television in 2022. 

Speaking on the Battleground podcast, Khan discussed Taylor’s debut and new talent coming to 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. 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.

Khan noted the success, commercially and critically, of AEW x NJPW Forbidden Door as the positive reception of new talent coming to AEW. 

ROH will hold its ROH Final Battle event on Saturday, which will be headlined by Claudio Castagnoli challenging Chris Jericho for the ROH World Title. Fans can check out the current lineup by clicking here.

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