AEW President Tony Khan has had his fair share of critics since starting the company in January 2019, one of which being Eric Bischoff. Despite having appeared on AEW programming in the past, the WWE Hall of Famer has often been vocal about his thoughts on how Tony Khan operates All Elite Wrestling. Recently, Tony Khan responded to comments made by Bischoff stating that AEW had matches for the sake of having matches, labelling him a hypocrite.
During a new interview with Fightful, Bischoff responded to Khan, claiming that he reminds him of a 15 year-old with too much money on his hands.
“I think what Tony says is funny. Because he reminds me of a fifteen year old kid that’s got too much money and doesn’t know what to do with it and he’s running around, bouncing off walls trying to make some sense out of stuff. Look, I never said that every match on every show needs to have a story. But your top three or four should and I encouraged Tony, who has an employee by the name of Kevin Sullivan, who was formerly a director in TNA. Not the booker. Two different Kevin Sullivans. Kevin Sullivan, the producer and the director, works for Tony, and Kevin Sullivan has a show bible that I created for Spike TV, Viacom while I was there.”
-Eric Bischoff
Bischoff continued, elaborating on his criticisms of the product, as well as further emphasising his belief that the company is Tony Khan’s vanity project.
“I would encourage Tony to look at that because it really illustrates to someone who’s never done it before how you make sure you’re A story, your B story, your C story, your D story all have structure and all carry out over the course of three or four months. Then your stories underneath that, your opening matches, your mid-card matches where you’re introducing your talent or trying to establish talent that has yet to be established. They don’t necessarily need to have a back story. You can just bring people out and just showcase them. That’s fine as long as you have legitimate story and well structured story for your top four matches. That’s what I’ve said all along. But Tony has a tendency to ricochet off walls and say stupid shit because he doesn’t really understand much about the industry really. He’s a wrestling fan with a lot of money. It’s a $100,000,000 vanity project. Good for him. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be Tony Khan. Who wouldn’t want to have a $100,000,000 or $1,000,0000,000 to go play in whatever sandbox you want to play in. Then, of course, you’re not going to want to be criticized by people who have done it before. But that’s just human nature, I guess.”
-Eric Bischoff
The former Senior Vice President of WCW was then asked if AEW could potentially make money off of CM Punk and The Elite’s real life tension. Bischoff originally hesitated to answer said question due to the nature of the investigation, however he did ultimately loop back to his criticisms of Tony Khan, noting that he could’ve handled the situation better.
“I don’t know if you can make money off of it because now—and I don’t know a lot about it, so I’m hesitant to comment on it just because there’s so much I don’t know—from what we all know, because I don’t know more than you all do watching from the outside, there’s a lack of leadership. When you’ve got that much turmoil amongst that many different people and it’s manifest to your audience, and you got talent that you’re paying millions and millions and millions of dollars to, and they’re coming out and showing their ass in a national media scrum and calling out the owner of the company and calling out other people in the company, to me, that’s a reflection on leadership or lack thereof. How would I handle it? I don’t know, man. I don’t know. I wouldn’t have put myself in that position to begin with. If you remember, you may not have paid any attention, but I made a comment one day months before all that went down, I said, ‘CM Punk’s gonna be the biggest financial flop in the wrestling business.’ It stirred up all kinds of stuff. Tony Khan’s hair caught on fire. He’s babbling like a fucking idiot. He was so upset about it. Three months later, here we are. So I wouldn’t have put myself in that position.”
-Eric Bischoff
Bischoff and Khan’s war of words appears to be far from over, and thus it’s unlikely that the WWE Hall of Famer will be making any further AEW appearances any time soon.
