Tony Khan addresses criticism of how certain wrestlers are introduced in AEW

This past Friday on AEW Rampage, the company debuted former ROH television champion Shane Taylor in a segment with Keith Lee to set up a tag team match at the upcoming ROH Final Battle PPV. During an appearance on the Battleground podcast, AEW President Tony Khan addressed criticism of how certain wrestlers are introduced in AEW…

“There are fans who have never seen Shane Taylor before, and that’s okay. You get introduced to new faces all the time. When I was a young wrestling fan, that was one of the things I liked about WCW Nitro. I think it would be very ironic now that the same promoter [Eric Bischoff] would tell you, you don’t want to see these faces or introduce new people on TV because they were the ones who did that. A lot of times these new faces or read in a magazine, I’d never seen before and they would just walk out and wrestle on Nitro like it was perfectly natural and I thought it was the coolest thing. I guess that’s not acceptable anymore even though its much much easier to access information on the internet than it was in 1996. You saw wrestlers coming in from all promotions in the 90s on Nitro. Wrestlers coming to TBS or TNT is nothing new. People complaining about it ad nauseam on the internet is certainly new. At the end of the day, you want to listen to what the fans are saying. Overall, there has been a positive reception to a lot of international wrestlers coming to AEW.” (quote courtesy of Jeremy Lambert)