The days of AEW nipping at the heels of shows like RAW and SmackDown are now a distant memory. Vince McMahon's WWE departure did Tony Khan no favours, and his attempts to counter a red-hot WWE have only served to highlight AEW's many weaknesses.
While AEW's success is beneficial to the professional wrestling business as a whole, fans remain incredibly territorial, and many feel that Khan's leadership is holding the company back.
AEW's longtime critics have taken great delight in being proved right, and we can still count WWE Hall of Famer and former WCW boss Eric Bischoff among them. Even with WWE not quite reaching the same heights as it did last year, AEW is a distant second, and Bischoff feels that the introduction of the new AEW National Championship is a desperate move amid declining ratings.
"It’s called neurodivergent booking or creative. That’s exactly what. It’s all over the map, and nothing means anything if there’s no value, if there’s no perceived value, if there’s no stakes; it’s just garnish on a plate," the WWE Hall of Famer stated. "By throwing more garnish on the same plate and expecting people to feel differently about it, whatever, it’s not really very creative."
"It’s actually worse than not very creative. It actually hurts because it further dilutes the value, or the perceived value, of any other title and the story that goes with it. I would be working so desperately hard on a plan B right now, it would make people around me crazy. This is unsustainable, and I’m not saying that because I’m negative, anti-AEW."
"These numbers, and I’ve been saying it for years now, if you don’t focus on story, if you don’t focus on character. I have been individually predicting what is going to happen along the way if he fails to do it," he continued. "And he said every benchmark I’ve laid out now they’re at the point where, not only do you have renegotiation staring you down, you’ve got a possible acquisition of your network, and you’ve got to have a plan B."
"These numbers are ridiculously low. They’re pathetically low. Dynamite prime time. You’re looking at 400,000, 500,000 viewers, and I don’t care if it’s number seven on the network; it doesn’t f***ing matter. That’s a participation trophy. You’re either driving revenue or you’re not, and this company is not driving revenue. I don’t care what anybody says," Bischoff added.
There's a lot of sense in what Bischoff says here, and he'd go on to point out that, if AEW loses its current rights deal with Warner Bros. Discovery, there may be nowhere on network or cable television for the company to go.
While we wouldn't go quite that far (someone would pick AEW up), the odds of shows like Dynamite and Collision remaining on a platform anywhere near as big as TBS and HBO Max are definitely slim. In fact, like TNA before it, we'd imagine AEW quickly fading into obscurity...if indeed they lose that current rights deal.
Bischoff concluded by saying, "Over the last five years, they’ve lost an average of 20% or more of their audience year over year over year. Who wants to buy that? And if you do, you’re buying it for nickels and dimes, not dollars, because that’s all it’s worth There’s no big broadcast rights deal at the end of this rainbow, because they have spent five years proving that they’re screwing themselves into the dirt. They’re really good at it."
You can hear more from the former WCW boss in the player below.