Tony Khan Says Pandemic Helped Level Playing Field With WWE

Tony Khan says the COVID-19 pandemic played a role in closing the competitive gap between AEW and WWE, pointing to how both companies were forced to keep running shows without a live audience during that stretch.

Speaking on the Power Players podcast with Brian Sozzi, Khan revisited the early pandemic period when wrestling was one of the few sports and entertainment products that never missed a week on television. WWE relocated its programming to the Performance Center in Orlando before eventually building out the ThunderDome setup, while AEW set up shop at Daily’s Place in Jacksonville, Florida, running empty-arena shows from the same home base for an extended period.

Khan’s framing suggests that the shared circumstances of the shutdown — both promotions producing weekly television without fans, without the usual arena advantages WWE has long enjoyed, and without the ability to lean on live crowd atmosphere — effectively neutralized some of the built-in advantages a much larger, more established company like WWE would typically hold over a promotion that was still only in its second year of existence at the time.

AEW launched in 2019 and was still finding its footing when the pandemic hit in March 2020, but the disruption to the industry’s usual rhythms gave the young promotion a chance to operate on more even footing production-wise, at least temporarily. Daily’s Place became something of a signature setting for AEW during that stretch, hosting Dynamite, Dark, and pay-per-view events as the promotion built out its identity in front of a socially-distanced, and later limited, crowd.

Khan has been open in the past about how the AEW-WWE dynamic has shifted over the years since the company’s launch, and his latest comments add to that ongoing narrative about how unusual circumstances early in AEW’s history shaped its growth. As for whether he expanded further on the topic during the podcast appearance, that wasn’t detailed beyond his central point about the pandemic’s leveling effect.