AEW President Tony Khan has addressed the recent trend of WWE running events at the same time as major AEW shows, a tactic many fans have described as “counterprogramming.” In a recent interview on Going Ringside, Khan stated that despite the “tough competition,” AEW has been able to “stick and move” and is currently having what he considers to be “maybe the best year of AEW ever.”
“Well, we’re having a great year. We’ve been able to stick and move and make it work really well for us. There’s always going to be tough competition, and in this sport, it’s very tough competition, a kind of competition that makes you work really hard 52 weeks a year,” Khan said. “For AEW, we’re having a great year. We’ve been putting on great shows. The TV shows have gotten great ratings. We’ve got great support from our audience. And we’ve really grown the audience in 2025.”
He specifically noted the growth of the television audience for both Dynamite and Collision, even with the addition of streaming on HBO Max, a result he says is the “opposite of what the analysts had predicted.”
Khan also touted the quality of AEW’s pay-per-view offerings in 2025. “The pay-per-views, you mentioned pay-per-views, we’re doing our best pay-per-views we’ve ever done. If you say… from the past six years, what are the top 10 AEW pay-per-views? I think there’s a good chance five out of the 10, six out of the 10 would be from this year,” he stated. “So it’s definitely a great year for the product of AEW and we’re very focused on how we can make AEW the best wrestling company it can be.”
The most recent example of the competitive scheduling between the two companies came this past weekend, when WWE’s inaugural Wrestlepalooza event was scheduled on the same day as AEW’s long-running All Out pay-per-view. In response to the head-to-head conflict, AEW made the decision to move the start time of All Out to the afternoon, a move that allowed fans to watch both shows without overlap. Khan has since stated he is open to making the afternoon start time a more permanent fixture for future pay-per-view events.