Last weekend, AEW President Tony Khan posted this while Ariel Helwani’s interview with WWE President Nick Khan was dominating conversation on the wrestle web. I believe it’s what you young ‘uns call a subtweet, fired off in response to Nick Khan’s comments about the ongoing NXT rebrand and its focus on teaching non-wrestlers to be WWE Superstars:
Professional wrestling is an art form. You don’t create great artists by training them all to paint by numbers in the same way.
— Tony Khan (@TonyKhan) August 22, 2021
Yesterday (Aug. 27), after another report on WWE’s new direction for their developmental program saying they won’t even be scouting independent wrestling promotions, TK was clear that he was reacting to that story. But rather than offer his own words, he stuck to the internet’s common tongue - GIFs and memes.
https://t.co/KWq13clzjb pic.twitter.com/VtlViqy88c
— Tony Khan (@TonyKhan) August 27, 2021
— Tony Khan (@TonyKhan) August 27, 2021
Tony Khan is making sure the portion of the wrestling audience that’s very online knows that AEW is taking a very different approach than the one WWE & Nick Khan are. We’ll see whose approach gets folks who don’t follow a bunch of wrestlers and wrestling blogs more excited. Or, here’s a radical notion, maybe both can attract enough fans to be successful?
Stay tuned.