Last night's episode of AEW Dynamite took place in Long Island's UBS Arena. The show was reportedly a near-sellout, with 9,176 tickets sold compared to RAW's 5,887 (WWE scrambled to hold that show in the same venue on November 29). This marks another embarrassing loss for WWE, and AEW President Tony Khan addressed that during a recent News 12 interview.
"I just came to run a show on Long Island and it’s like hey, you know, they jump in the front of the line, run a show ahead of me, try to beat me in a market. Well, how did it work out?"
Khan then went on to address WWE's recent decision to extend SmackDown in an effort to hurt AEW Rampage's ratings (which backfired when the AEW show drew a higher number in the key 18-49 demographic). "You try to compete, like [a] 30-minute window, head-to-head on FOX, FS1 against TNT and I didn’t make that choice for them to extend the broadcast by 30 minutes. I was very surprised to see it. My comments were genuine when I saw it."
"We won the rating by a good amount, the demo and then I saw ratings getting leaked over the weekend. It wasn’t from us," he continued. "I wasn’t the one leaking them and then when the important numbers, the ones the network actually looks at came out Monday, we were victorious and somebody tried to get out in front of us for days by leaking stuff. That wasn’t AEW."
The more WWE tries to hurt AEW, the worse it's going to be when the newer company manages to sneak in victories like the ones Khan discusses here. It doesn't result in good press for Vince McMahon, anyway, and makes a promotion WWE wants people to believe is a small-time competitor both bigger and better than them (you can just see the steam leaving Vince's ears at the thought).
Check out the full interview below:
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