Tony Khan Now Claims He Isn’t Competing With WWE This Week

After debuting over two years ago, AEW has certainly gone through a lot of developments and for many, it has become its own brand of pro wrestling and not merely just an alternative to WWE.

Many fans have praised AEW’s in-ring product and its focus on the professional wrestling aspect of the show. Even CM Punk recently stated that AEW doesn’t ignore wrestling lovers like WWE does.

Tony Khan recently stated that he can’t wait to see AEW Rampage defeat Friday Night Smackdown in ratings this week as Smackdown will be airing on FS1.

While speaking on Moose & Maggie on WFAN, Tony Khan talked about this week’s battle between AEW Rampage and Friday Night Smackdown, where he admitting that he isn’t focusing on competing with WWE this week.

“The most important thing is that AEW does the best shows, and if you watch the shows, we built this audience from scratch. There was no AEW a couple of years ago. Now AEW on TNT is the best show in many fans’ eyes, and we’re building and building this audience. Year over year, we’re up double digits. Every month, we’re up year over year, and now we’re up 30% over where we were a year ago, and there’s a reason for that. It’s, in some ways, the worst timing. We’re off Wednesday for the next couple of weeks.

It’s a big weekend for us because we need to make a statement. We were doing such great numbers on Wednesday, so it’s bad timing to have Dynamite moved to the weekend, but we built this great thing in Rampage, and we have Friday night Rampage on TNT at 10:00 and we have Saturday night Dynamite on TNT at 8:00. Right now, we have all this momentum. The number one show on all of cable and satellite TV six straight Wednesdays. It’s bad timing to be moving off Wednesday when you’re on such a great recent run, but this weekend’s huge for us, and the shows have been so good. It’s not about competing with them. It’s about doing our best show.”

We will have to wait and see whether AEW Rampage will be able to beat Friday Night Smackdown in ratings or not this week.

h/t to Wrestling Inc for the quotes.

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