Tony Khan On Using A Limited Roster During COVID-19, Creative Choices

All Elite Wrestling President Tony Khan was the latest guest on a special edition of the AEW Unrestricted podcast. Khan opened up about the promotion working with a limited roster thanks to COVID-19. He also reflected on the coronavirus pandemic and the creative decisions AEW had to employ.

Khan explained how several of their female talents live outside of the United States. With travel bans and limitations in place, it meant losing some talent they may have had plans for. However, Tony Khan admitted AEW was “fortunate that a lot of the top women ranked in the division at the time were here.”

Tony Khan added how they had 20 percent of the AEW roster available to them in Atlanta, Georgia as the coronavirus pandemic restricted movement and travel. Although this would have forced changes to planned storylines, Khan is happy with how AEW was able to pivot and change accordingly. This number also meant they had enough wrestlers available to put on the TNT Championship tournament:

“We were able to do this great tournament and tell some great stories,” said Tony Khan. “We were able to do some really good shows and I was proud of some numbers we did on the back end of those shows, especially as we went later in the month on the taped shows. The numbers were going up which proved the stories were compelling.”

AEW is preparing for its next Fyter Fest event. It will be a two-week event and is scheduled to take place on 7/1 and 7/8 on TNT.

The greatest thing AEW have done during the covid-19 crisis is still the debut of Broken Matt, where he teleported trough the arena, confronting Chris Jericho.

^ That was absolutely ridiculous and completely killed the gimmick, the segment and the entire show for me. Hardy's current gimmick of "transporting between different versions" of himself is pathetic.

^^ Then you are probably the only one who thinks that :P LOL, I've never been a big fan of Matt or Jeff hardy, but the Broken character is pure genious from Matt's part.

His "Broken" gimmick was good in TNA, but it died a death in WWE and now in AEW. Especially when they're doing the silly transportation gimmick, it makes no sense and is just showing disrespect for fans' intelligence.