Tony Khan
speaker
120 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Tony Khan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
As the sporting director, we didn't win the playoff. And I thought we were the better team, and I was frustrated. But I always thought we would go up the next year. We did go up the next year. And this was in May of 2017. I remember feeling terrible and thinking that it was such a disappointment. And it was so much pressure to go up the next year now. And we wouldn't really be able to...
play games for a few months, and we're going to have to sit and wait for a few months to start building up again to get back to the same point we were. It was going to take a full year, and it was going to be another year in the championship, and that was really hard. And I... felt really terrible that night and really sick. And that was really hard.
But other than that, I mean, I still felt like we would do it. I just knew it was going to take another year. And I think that's the way I felt when we've had some of the setbacks. Sometimes when you have a setback, reset your clock. Well, it's going to take a year now to build back to where we just were.
And thankfully, what we've been able to do is I was about to say, I think the most positive thing that's happened in many years, is we made a great hire with the head coach in 2021 and brought Marco Silva, who had great experience in England. He managed teams. He'd been in the Premier League. I had never worked with him.
I had only met him for a couple seconds in passing when he was the manager of Everton, when Fulham was playing Everton in 2019. And Then we reconnected on Zoom in 2021, which is very fitting because I see him on Zoom a lot now. And it was such a perfect chemistry. And I have so much respect for Marco. And the team has been able to go to another level.
So these are things that happened on the road to AEW. But these are a lot of my experiences and things that are still a big part of my life. the NFL and the Premier League, what we do at True Media. And now I work in a sport that's also 52 weeks a year in AEW Pro Wrestling.
Well, I'll flash back to the in-between. So I had that low point. For me, I felt in 2017, two days of just, and it was not despair. I wasn't thinking we won't be able to do it. It wasn't even a lack of confidence. It was really just the frustration that it's going to take a year to get right back to where we just were. And we had it in our grasp.
And now it's going to take a year to get to the same point to get back up. And around that same time into the next season, we had a slow start to the 2017 season. And things really picked up in December. And we started a run of winning and a run as an unbeaten team that extended 23 games, which is half a season.
So we went unbeaten then from the week before Christmas until the final week of the season. And then we ended up winning the playoff final against Aston Villa at Wembley Stadium in May of 2018. And it was so huge. It was a huge part of my life. During that, there was a weekend when I was in Los Angeles. And my business partner, Bernie Cahill, Bernie invited me to a party in Beverly Hills.
And I saw... A good friend who was Bernie's other best friend was Kevin Riley, who was the president of TBS and TNT at the time. And I found it very interesting what was happening with the media rights in the wrestling business that we'd gotten to a point where there were hundreds of millions of dollars in wrestling TV shows.
The pay-per-view business and the tickets and the merchandising, these have always been big parts of wrestling, but something changed in the last decade, which is the rights fees for the wrestling shows went up and they became similar to what you'd see for some of the top sports leagues for their game packages. But when you think about it, the wrestling show, it's on 52 weeks a year.
It's on every week. It's very reliable and draws a great rating. That can be a great thing for a network. And it was really only one company that was producing that product at the time, and that was WWE. In 2018, the rights bees had gone up dramatically. So when I talked to Kevin, I had the light bulb go off. And it occurred to me that somebody could launch a new wrestling promotion.
And if you could get even a fraction of what the competition would be getting for their rights fees, you could build a promotion based on that. Because really, that was the game-changing thing, was that now there was the potential if you could build a roster of stars and have a great lineup of wrestlers,
which I also believed I would be able to assemble in the next year based on the market conditions and who I knew was going to be available in wrestling at that time, just as a fan following wrestling. It all came together very quickly. Kevin showed interest. He did not shoot my idea down.
I suddenly thought I had something that we could really build and something that we could take to the market and build take all over the world, build an audience with it. TV markets all over the planet, which we have, because now AEW in 2025, we're on over 150 countries now. It's amazing how we've grown the business, but that's really where it started was a conversation
It was one of those ideas, you know, when you have an idea that's really good and you think, this is such a good idea. And another thing that was the timing was in 2018... The McMahon family announced they were going to relaunch the XFL. That probably also had an effect on my thinking because that sounded like a terrible idea to me.
And the amount of money they were going to put into it when the NFL is such a dominant competitor and the NFL is so strong. And I think I was proven right because the league, the XFL, did go bankrupt. And I thought that's not going to work. You know what would work is a second wrestling league. There's way more wrestlers out there to start a second wrestling league.
If I built a challenger wrestling league, the roster of that league would be so much better comparatively than the roster of the XFL. It wouldn't even be close. And as a viewer of the sports, as somebody who loves football and wrestling, wrestling needs a second league a lot more than football does. And I think we were proven true of that.
The market conditions were right. First of all, it wouldn't apply to every person in every situation. This is a very specific thing. It involved a huge war chest. And that meant big startup costs to start this. And thankfully, I was able to go to an investor, which is my father. And now he, in this case, was a very discerning investor. And it was really a big fight to get a launch.
He didn't think this was going to work like it has.
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