Tony Khan Reveals What He Looks For When Signing Talent To AEW

[Kemo]

AEW President Tony Khan has gone in-depth on what he looks for when trying to sign talent for his promotion.

When Khan got AEW started back in 2019, many wondered how the roster would shake out. As it turns out, AEW has signed a mix of premier talent on the indies, internationally, and formerly of WWE.

He’s even signed some standout athletes who never had a wrestling background.

AEW star Swerve Strickland had Tony Khan as a guest on his Swerve City podcast. During his appearance, Khan laid out what he’s in search of when doing some scouting.

“Well, there’s a lot of things. First of all, when you look at their body of work coming in, sometimes you get athletes, like Satnam Singh is a great example or Jade Cargill, where they didn’t have prior experience in pro wrestling, but they were great athletes, actually both of them played basketball at a high level. I thought they were worth a gamble.

“We typically don’t take people in who don’t have a lot of prior wrestling experience. We don’t train wrestlers from scratch here. It’s a different business model. There are a lot of great people, but for us, we kind of pick our spots when it comes to that thing, because we’re not as much about centralized training all week long.

“We come together like locusts in a different city every week and then we go our separate ways. I think for us, having a lot of prior wrestling experience is really important.

“So for example Swerve is somebody I’d seen wrestle in different promotions and I really loved your stuff. I had seen a lot of your matches before you came in. Some other people might not have as much experience as you and might not have had as much success, or really might not be as far along or as developed or as good.

“There’s other people where it’s hard to track them down.“

Fans have taken notice of AEW’s approach toward building young stars such as MJF, HOOK, Wheeler Yuta, Daniel Garcia, and Lee Moriarty. Those names all had some level of wrestling knowledge before being signed to AEW.

As Khan mentioned, Jade Cargill was someone who came in as an athlete outside the wrestling business. Cargill did receive a WWE tryout back in 2019.

She ended up training at the Face 2 Face Wrestling School before transitioning to the Nightmare Factory.

[TKO]

Former WWE stars