Tony Khan says ‘the gloves are off’ and claims he has more money than WWE

AEW President Tony Khan did an interview with NYPost.com and talked about AEW’s upcoming Rampage and Dynamite shows in Miami, FL. Khan also discussed the Rampage going head-to-head with WWE…

“We’ve never had anything like this before with three hours of live wrestling on TNT on a weekend other than a pay-per-view. There are a ton of things happening at this time of year, there’s a lot of sports. There’s a lot of competition outside of wrestling. So if we’re going to start trying to directly head-to-head compete with each other at this time of year where there are all these other things happening in sports, let’s go. I’m not the one who threw the gloves off, but if somebody has to do the talking and sell the fight I will be the one to do it. In this case, I am doing all the talking and all the selling of the fight. I do think we need to go back to an era where there is all this excitement about the shows. It’s clearly built buzz because a lot of people are talking about it.

We got a great opportunity to draw people on the weekend in a new position for us. Rampage has launched very recently and we’ve had this great run of Wednesdays where we’ve had six straight weeks as the No. 1 show on all of cable television on Wednesday. And now Dynamite is being moved to a relatively unfamiliar Saturday night time slot. Three hours of weekend wrestling is very different. I put together the Buy In as a response, but that took some time. I wasn’t able to do that right away. So I wanted to let people know the gloves are off.”

Khan also talked about how Rampage competing with Smackdown is different from Dynamite competing with WWE NXT…

“It’s a little bit different than the Wednesday Night Wars because that was from the very beginning of Dynamite and we put our head down and it was an every-week thing. This seemed like pretty predatory, which is fine if that’s how you want to play it. It’s not outwardly how they’ve (WWE) shown they wanted to play it.

I’ve coined a phrase which is WYW, watch your wrestling. Whatever people what to watch, I want them to watch it. Unfortunately, if we are on at the same time it’s harder for people to watch their wrestling, at least live. We can take the commercials out of it. If you want to take the commercials out of it, I can do that too. It doesn’t seem very civil but I have more money than they do so I can afford to do that longer than they can. But that’s how we make money at the end of the day, so I was surprised when they took those out.”

Tony Khan says ‘gloves are off’ with AEW Rampage set for WWE SmackDown battle

Tony Khan has no problem counterpunching WWE if they are going to bring the fight to him this Friday. The All Elite Wrestling president has reacted to WWE’s “SmackDown” on FS1 being supersized and running a half-hour and commercial free into “AEW Rampage (10 p.m., TNT).