Weird Things Everyone Ignores About AEW

It's been almost seven years since The Elite stood outside the Tokyo Dome and announced that they would be forming their own promotion called All Elite Wrestling, and even they couldn't have imagined what their new project would go on to achieve.

Since 2019, AEW has secured three different media rights deals with Warner Brothers Discovery, the most recent being worth over $550 Million which has in turn made the company profitable for the first time in its history. "AEW Dynamite" has surpassed the number of episodes that both "WCW Monday Nitro" and "WCW Thunder" had during that company's prime years, and their All In London event in August 2023 broke the world record for the most amount of tickets sold for a wrestling event in history, beating even the highest attended WWE WrestleMania events. The company has been one of the biggest success stories in the history of the business, but it's not without its faults.

In terms of age, AEW is still in single digits, but because of the mammoth financial backing from company President Tony Khan and his family, the expectations for the company are astronomically high and all of the teething problems that AEW has had have been examined with a microscope and exaggerated to the furthest possible degree. What's more, the brand that they are the challenger to is THE brand in professional wrestling as WWE has reached the level where someone who doesn't watch wrestling could bring it up in conversation and the first thing most people will think of is WWE.

It's because of this that a lot of fans give AEW the benefit of the doubt when it comes to some of their mistakes, but there are some things, both bad and good, that have just been flat-out ignored since 2019. That's what we're here to talk about today. The moments and talking points in AEW's near seven year history that are conveniently lost to time despite existing entirely in the digital social media age, and while some of these points aren't exactly negative, it is very weird that people in the world of wrestling choose to ignore them.

When All Elite Wrestling was formed, there was a lot of excitement surrounding it. WWE was at a low point creatively, TNA (then known as Impact Wrestling) was a far cry from what it was in the 2000s, and despite having a resurgence in popularity in the 2010s thanks to the likes of The Young Bucks and Cody Rhodes, Ring of Honor was still struggling to keep most of their top stars from jumping to "WWE NXT." AEW was the shiny new toy that everyone wanted to play with, and it was a company that meant business thanks to the financial backing from the Khan family. Having said all of that, the early days of AEW haven't exactly aged like a fine wine.

Every few months on social media, you will see a post making the rounds that says something along the lines of "AEW isn't like what it was in 2019." The comments and replies will be full of people agreeing, saying that the vibes were unmatched and that it was exciting and that the wrestling was better, and everything in between. However, those people are blinded by nostalgia because AEW in 2019 isn't as good as people remember it. Fans slam WWE for rewriting the history books on their own past (and at times the history of wrestling itself), but AEW is guilty of that too as there is a lot more to the company's first year than Double or Nothing 2019 and the first episode of "AEW Dynamite."

All of it is available to watch on HBO MAX for you to make your own judgment, but there is a good reason why no one talks about the likes of The Nightmare Collective, one of, if not the worst faction in the history of the company. The debut of The Butcher and The Blade wasn't met with people falling over themselves with excitement, it was met with the most loyal of AEW fans at the time chanting "who are you?" Then there is the infamous December 18, 2019 episode of "Dynamite" that concluded with The Dark Order and their "creepers" delivering the worst beatdown you have ever seen, to the point where Tony Khan stepped in and started booking the show himself from January 1, 2020 onwards.

It's human nature to look back on the past with rose-tinted glasses and believe that everything that happened in the past is much better than what is happening in the present, but that isn't always the case. AEW was far from perfect in its first year and most of the people involved with the company at the time would agree with that. The company has grown and matured so much that 2019 AEW looks almost amateur compared to 2025 AEW. It's not a bad show by any means, but people need to stop acting that the first year of AEW was the greatest thing the wrestling world had ever seen, because it wasn't.

Everyone knows that AEW President Tony Khan has an encyclopaedia-like brain when it comes to professional wrestling. He can remember specific dates and matches to the point where he even shocked former WWE Superstar Maven by remembering the match order of a 2004 house show he wrestled on. This of course meant that Khan was an avid member of the Internet Wrestling Community back in the day, but the problem with that is that it leaves a digital footprint that is still somewhat reachable. For example, The Wrestling Sleaze List.

The Wrestling Sleaze List was a document that was uploaded onto the Angelfire website in the mid-2000s, and at the time of its release it was something that had online wrestling fans talking for weeks on end. Backstage stories of matches going wrong, fights between wrestlers in the locker room, and a lot of rumors and speculation about the sexual lives of the performers who we watch every week, this was a list that came with the disclaimer that only about 10% of the near 500 entries were close to being true, but in the 20 years since its release, a few of them have been outright confirmed. So what does this have to do with Tony Khan and why would it be ignored? 

The list itself was compiled by someone named Supreme, which was also the name of a wrestler in XPW but it's never been confirmed if that was the Supreme who made the list. All of the rumors and gossip were sourced from a thread on the Death Valley Driver forum titled "The Scummiest Wrestling Urban Legends" in 2004, a thread that you can still visit to this day. Tony Khan was a member of the DVDVR forum and has openly shared his history of being a part of online wrestling forums, with the ACTION Wrestling DEAN~!!!2 and 3 shows being co-promoted by Ring of Honor due to Khan's past on the website. While it's never been confirmed if Khan was a part of the sleazy thread itself, one thing stands out about it, the username of the person who made the thread in the first place, "Coach Tony K."

This can simply be a coincidence and be marked down to Tony K being a common name, and it can probably be ignored and even dismissed due to the fact that one of Khan's actual usernames was revealed by the man himself. In 2021, Khan revealed that his AOL email included the name TonyFlair due to how much he loved "The Nature Boy" Ric Flair. A Reddit user then did some digging and found a number of wrestling forums where someone who went by the name TonyFlair was a prominent member. TonyFlair was part of AOL Grandstand that got taken down by WWE of all things, and was even part of "The Cannon Cult" which was a group of fans who celebrated the life and work of the late Brian Pillman.

These days, Khan is the corporate face of AEW, and while he is proud to be a lifelong wrestling fan, some of the things he typed back in the day should be left in the past and rightfully ignored.

When AEW first started, one of the main ideas from a booking standpoint would be bringing back the old notion that wins and losses actually matter. You can't lose 20 matches in a row and still expect a championship match just because you had a problem with someone three years ago, you had to put together a string of wins that would put in title contention, and in turn the top five of the company's ranking system.

The men's, women's, and tag team divisions were all given separate rankings where the more a wrestler or tag team won, the higher they would climb up the ranks. The higher their ranking, the more likely they were to get a title shot. It was a very straight forward way of building anticipation for an upcoming pay-per-view as you could see someone picking up a string of big victories and gradually moving up the rankings to the point where they would become the top contender. The rankings system was also part of the reason why, outside of Double or Nothing 2021, every AEW Men's World Championship match was a straight one-on-one contest as there a champion and a definitive number one contender.

As 2022 rolled on, the rankings became more of a hindrance than a help. The introduction of the AEW TBS, World Trios, and All-Atlantic Championships meant that people outside of the traditional top five started to say that they wanted title shots, even though they weren't ranked and hadn't picked up enough wins. However, if that person can get a shot at the drop of a hat, why can't another person? Things started to get very complicated and eventually the rankings were quietly dropped from the company, with only the win/loss record being shown on a wrestler's lower third nameplate, and even those are changed to fit a certain story beat.

Throughout 2023, fans started to ask where the rankings had gone. The answer was that they got in the way of AEW being able to set up matches that didn't have to rely on wins and losses in order to matter, something that even CM Punk mentioned while he was part of the company. Tony Khan is a man who listens to his fans a lot of the time and at the start of 2024, the rankings made a miraculous return, with then AEW Men's World Champion Samoa Joe stating that someone had to be ranked in order to face him for the title. It was a big deal to bring back the rankings and it was played up as such on TV, but after Joe lost the title to Swerve Strickland, those same rankings quietly went away again, and have stayed gone ever since.

It's a shame because when they worked, the rankings made AEW's brand of storytelling feel different to what WWE was producing at the time. However, they got canned, were brought back, and canned again within 18 months, and nobody talks about it.

If there is one criticism that is always thrown at AEW and Tony Khan as a booker, it's usually that All Elite Wrestling doesn't tell stories. This usually comes from a select group of wrestling fans who are only used to one way of doing things, and think that the only way to tell a story in professional wrestling is through promos, video packages, and backstage segments. Forget the wrestling part about professional wrestling, none of that matters, it's all about everything that goes on outside the squared circle. Anything that happens in between the ropes is meaningless.

Of course, those people aren't fans of AEW and most likely don't watch the company on a week-to-week basis. If they did, they would know that some of the greatest wrestling storylines of the modern era have taken place within the confines of AEW. CM Punk vs. MJF, Toni Storm vs. Mariah May, Hangman Page has literally been called "The main character of AEW" because his stories with the likes of The Elite, Swerve Strickland, and Jon Moxley have been so important to the entire lore of the company. You could even make the argument that All In Texas wouldn't have been the success it was without the story of Hangman finally overcoming the Death Riders.

The problem that AEW has when it comes to its stories isn't the fact that the company isn't telling any, it's the fact that a lot of the time, there are actually too many and that is what gets ignored for whatever reason. We aren't at Vince Russo levels of storytelling where everyone including the cameramen, the staff at the arena, and the guy outside the venue selling bootlegged merchandise are involved in storylines, but there are a lot of people involved in storylines in AEW and the problem is that the majority of them are half-baked.

Having a roster the size of what Tony Khan has (especially when you include Ring of Honor) means that you end having so many plates to spin that some of those plates just fall off the stick. However, this gets interpreted as not having any stories when in reality it's having too many. If you have different wrestlers in every segment on a show, that means an average episode of "AEW Dynamite" could end up having anywhere from 15 to 20 stories at a time which is too many to keep track of and too many to really invest in. It's great that so many people have so many things to do, but fans lose track of when and where things have happened to the point where story beats will occur and they seem to have come out of nowhere.

AEW is a storytelling company and a lot of fans ignore that for their own personal agendas, but the biggest factor that is overlooked is that there are almost too many stories going on at once, which is arguably a worse scenario.

We mentioned in the beginning that not all of these points would be negative and this is that one positive because, whether the fans or the company itself would like to admit it, WWE would not be in the position its in right now if it wasn't for AEW.

Before AEW was formed, WWE was at a low point creatively. Attendance was dwindling, bright ideas were few and far between, and the morale surrounding the company, both in the crowd and the locker room, had hit rock bottom. Then AEW was formed and WWE's first choice was to try and make people forget that AEW existed by counterprogramming them with "WWE NXT." That wouldn't work out for them in the long run as the "Wednesday Night Wars" would eventually be seen as a big win for AEW, and up until Vince McMahon's exit from the company in July 2022, it looked as if AEW was going to be a legitimate threat to WWE.

Then Paul "Triple H" Levesque took over the creative direction of the company and everything changed. Likely still very bitter over not taking out AEW with "NXT," which in its Black and Gold era was Triple H's passion project, he transformed WWE into an unstoppable juggernaut that would reach levels of popularity that hadn't been seen since the Attitude Era. Whenever AEW did something good, Triple H would try and do ten things even better so that all of the focus was on WWE. Even some of AEW's quirks and tropes like post-show press conferences and focus on in-ring action were quietly adopted by WWE just so Triple H could say that he can do it better.

Regardless of how Triple H may or may not feel about AEW, the fact that AEW exists is something that has given WWE motivation to improve. While there were no real competitors following the demise of both WCW and ECW in 2001, WWE and Vince McMahon in particular realized that there was dwindling interest in wrestling because the only company that existed on a mainstream level didn't have to try anymore. McMahon even created his own competition within WWE with the brand split to improve ratings after noticing that if people aren't in to what WWE was doing, they don't have anywhere else to go so they will just stop watching wrestling completely.

AEW simply being around is enough of a motivator for the wrestlers to put on the best show they can every night, the fans to stay invested in the WWE product, and Levesque to put together the best possible cards, matches, and storylines possible. If they flounder, there is a small chance that AEW will rise up behind WWE, catch the company lacking, and go from being an alternative brand to legitimate competition. It's arguably the biggest thing about AEW that gets ignored, the fact that the company itself has greatly benefited the wrestling business, and has contributed to WWE's rejuvenated success over the past few years.