Eric Bischoff Is Impressed By AEW Despite Being Booked For Dirt Sheets
During the most recent MackMania Podcast, Eric Bischoff prised Tony Khan for his work with AEW so far.
Despite their public differences, he admitted that you have to be impressed with things and believes their trajectory has been cool to see so far.
"It's not relatively new, it's extremely, it's a newborn baby in terms of its lifespan if you compared it to a human. He's made tremendous progress in a very short period of time," he said. "And I don't know how anybody can look at that trajectory and not recognize that as being pretty damn cool, and be impressed with it."
Eric Bischoff went on to talk about AEW as a company, claiming it is hard to differentiate it from WWE. He believes that unless you are stuck in weeds online, it is tough to describe the difference between the two right now.
"AEW, the company as a whole is going to have to define, at some point, the vision," he said. "What makes AEW different than WWE? You can talk about it, you can kind of create a narrative about it. But when you look at the show, when you look at AEW and you look at WWE.
"If you're not in the weeds and in the dirt sheets, living on the internet spending half a day on Reddit, how would you describe the difference between those two shows? I think that's really hard to do right now."
Eric Bischoff went on to claim that Tony Khan does have his head plugged into the dirt sheet fans but thinks that something has to change if the company wants to grow as a business.
"On a personal level, I think Tony has got his head plugged into the dirt sheet wrestling community far too much. When you produce a show, especially like wrestling, you need to know who you're audience is," Bischoff said. "And you need to know who you want to be your audience, you have to grow your business. You can't just keep serving the same hardcore, dirt sheet wrestling fan psychology, and mentality, and expect to grow your business.
"You want to get up to 1.5 and be really competitive with RAW, or SmackDown? Guess what, you're going to have to take that million, give or take, viewers that you have every week, and grow that by 50%, or 75%, or 100% in order to be truly competitive. I don't see that happening, because I think Tony is dirt sheet booker of the year, two years in a row."
If you use any quotes from this article, please credit MackMania Podcast with a h/t to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription.