Eric Bischoff calls CM Punk “the biggest financial flop in the history of wrestling”

As previously noted, CM Punk fired back at criticism made by Eric Bischoff about AEW needing better storytelling.

During his 83 Weeks podcast, Bischoff addressed Punk…

“I wasn’t picking a fight, I was responding. Punk had some very edgy comments that I’m assuming were directed to me because they were in response to something [Conrad] and I said in a very interesting conversation about current wrestling, WWE and AEW. But evidently, he got a little case of the a**-rash and decided to lash out on social media. I love that sh**, I love to counter punch. Sometimes I don’t really wake up until I’ve been hit really hard, it’s just my nature but he threw a punch on social media and I thought this would be fun so I responded. I pointed out that this was a guy who came out and said that for a guy who thinks he was a bigger deal than Scott Hall and Kevin Nash coming to WCW, so far he’s fallen flat on his face. I published his quote, I didn’t make anything up. I took his quote and posted it and said how’s that working out? Which it isn’t, obviously. In terms of a return on investment, this guy has to be the biggest financial flop in the history of wrestling.”

“How many millions of dollars in net profit in t-shirt sales is he doing? Nobody knows and we’re responding to comments that aren’t backed up. If somebody can show me, then I’ll eat my words and I’m happy to do that. I’m wrong a lot, I’m aggressive, I try new things, I talk sh*t and I’m not always right and if I’m wrong, I’m wrong. So far all we get is ‘he’s selling so much merchandise,’ but how much is so much? By the way, once the initial excitement of anybody, not just CM Punk, you bring somebody in, you launch a new t-shirt, new merchandise, you get a big hit and then it just levels out so you come up with something new and if you’re really over, you can continue to come up with new merchandise and fill the tank. I don’t know if that’s true.”

“He came out to 1.17 million people who came out to see his debut Friday night on Rampage, it’s down to around 400-500 thousand on average. Punk’s primer on Dynamite did like 1.29 million people and they came, they saw and they left and now they’re hovering around that 900,000. Which they’ve been doing for, I don’t know, a year, year and a half. When Punk comes out and says he’s a bigger deal than Scott Hall and Kevin Nash coming to WCW, that created a paradigm shift with people watching wrestling, where Punk has created absolutely nothing.” (quotes courtesy of WrestlingInc.com)