Vince McMahon makes his feelings clear regarding AEW as competition in 2021.
All Elite Wrestling burst onto the scene in 2019 and in their 2 and a half years in existence, they have continued to grow and even taken names that were with WWE when they started and turned them into AEW Champions.
While this would not be WWE’s first rodeo in dealing with competition from another wrestling organization, Vince McMahon stated on a recent earnings conference call that he does not view AEW to be anywhere near the level of competition that WCW was 20 years ago.
“It’s certainly not a situation where it’s rising tides because Ted Turner was coming after us with all of Time Warner assets as well. It was a different situation. AEW is where they are. I don’t really know what their plans are, all I know is what our plans are. I don’t consider them competition in the way that I considered WCW back in the day. Not even near close to that. I’m not so sure what their investments are as far as their talent is concerned. Perhaps, we can give them some more.”
It was difficult to completely decipher Vince McMahon’s tone during the statement. His voice was difficult to read, due to volume issues, grunting, and his voice trailing off. In addition, Nick Khan would add to this by reiterating the company’s standpoint that they compete with all content creation conglomerates and their biggest competition is most likely the mere act of sleeping.
“The way we look at these situations, it’s sort of like a horse race where the horse has blinders on. We’re looking straight ahead and in our lane and making sure we stay in front of the pack. At the same time, everything is our competition. Someone had a line a couple of weeks ago that we chuckled about, ‘sleep is our competition.’ If it was up to us, people would be up 24 hours a day watching content from different content providers, hopefully, including ours. We don’t look at any organization particularly as competition, yet we see everything as competitive in terms of what we’re trying to do in terms of eyeballs.”
Recently, it was reported that AEW will be signing CM Punk and 2021 WrestleMania headliner, Daniel Bryan, to contracts.
Thanks to Fightful for the quotes from today’s call.
