AEW president Tony Khan spoke with PWInsider this week ahead of AEW Dynamite’s two-year anniversary and addressed a recent report about the structure of AEW changing behind the scenes. BodySlam‘s Cassidy Haynes, who broke the Bryan Danielson story well before he arrived at All Out, recently reported “creative was essentially completely taken away from the EVP’s, as basically everything now comes through/down to Tony Khan” and that a source had claimed Cody Rhodes, The Young Bucks and Kenny Omega were EVPs “in name only” at this point.ย
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Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer then reported the EVPs’ roles in the company haven’t changed since December 2019 and that while Khan took more control of the day-to-day booking none of them have lost any creative power. Khan called the reports “disingenuous.”ย
“Yeah, I saw those reports this week and I thought that was pretty disingenuous stuff from some of the internet wrestling writers because nothing has changed in recent months and really, the structure changed for me at the end of 2019 and it was because of me. I felt like I needed to take over and be more accountable as the CEO and as the Booker. I was the final say, but there were probably too many different people with input on segments and this show wasn’t as organized at the end of 2019 as I thought it could be,” Khan said. “So for the past two years, we’ve been a lot more organized and I’ve written every show by hand, which allows me to know which segments are where and I think the shows have gotten significantly better. The fans have enjoyed them more. They’ve performed better in terms of the ratings and it’s been a good change for us, but I saw somebody reporting that recently in the news and it’s not because, we talked about this, like over a year and a half ago we talked about this, and I went on the record.”
“This is all stuff that came into effect at the beginning of 2020,” he continued. “I had said my New Year’s resolution, myself, [was that] I was going to get very organized or I told myself if there’s something I didn’t feel good about, I wasn’t going to do it and that I was going to create much more of the work product myself, that I was going to lay out the matches, the stories and format everything into a nice package, myself, and I’ve been doing it for over a year and a half with the collaboration and help of a lot of great people, including the people I started with. I think the biggest difference has been instead of five people getting in a room and putting a format together, I get in a room and put a format together. I also get very amused when people refer to QT [Marshall], like the guy on the creative team. He’s effectively my assistant and he’s great. He works his ass off. He’ll show up in my room whenever I need him, and I sometimes will call him up at one in the morning to come up and I want to reorganize the show or make card changes, or I’m putting stuff together for Elevation or Dark or whatever I need. He’s usually there for me, but I’m very hands on with this stuff and it’s been that way for a long time. So I thought it was really disingenuous.”
