MJF on AEW’s competition: “They’re giving you fast food, we make gourmet burgers”
While speaking to Ross Tucker, AEW world champion MJF commented on the success of AEW…
“Tony Khan is a visionary. He’s a mark, but he’s a visionary—and he loves professional wrestling. He saw that there was an opening in the marketplace for an alternative to WWE. Where there’s Coke, you can have Pepsi. Where there’s McDonald’s, you can have Burger King, and so on and so forth.
They jumped in, they were able to pitch it in Hollywood, and here we are seven years later, killing it. We’ve had events with 82,000 people in a stadium at Wembley—an event that I main-evented and won. No big deal.
We have pay-per-views almost monthly. We’re normally in the top five on cable and streaming for Dynamite and Collision. We’re proud of what we’re doing right now, man. We’re up year-over-year in ticket sales with me as champion—duh. Must-see.
The thing I want to impart on people, whether you’re not a professional wrestling fan or you are one who just hasn’t given us a look yet, is that what we bring is authenticity. Other companies kind of feel like McDonald’s—they’re giving you fast food. We make gourmet burgers. And I think that was a big part of Tony Khan’s pitch, for sure.”