This week has seen a war of words dealt back and forth between AEW President Tony Khan and someone who has been a guest on AEW multiple times, Eric Bischoff.
Khan’s trash talking against WWE has continued for weeks, saying he has “more money” to air commercial-free programming, and even commenting that a recent WWE RAW, “sucked.” This compelled Bischoff to appear on his 83 Weeks podcast and send a message to Tony.
“If Tony [Khan] were to call me and ask for any advice, here’s what it would be — shut up and wrestle, dude” Bischoff said. “Just put out the best product you can and you’ve proven you can. Focus on that. Now this is weird coming from me, right? The guy who challenged Vince McMahon. The guy who gave away their finishes. But here’s the difference. I was actually competing with him. I was going head-to-head. Real head-to-head. Like, my show started the same time his show started each and every week.”
As seen in the tweet below, AEW star Chris Jericho has now chimed in on the situation, telling Bischoff that WWE putting SmackDown against AEW was due to a decreased market share.
“Not sure what a “cosplay competition” is Eric, but @WWE market share has definitely been decreased by @AEW. To the point whenever they forced themselves into “real head to head competition” w/ us (most recently last Fri) they lost. I’m gonna shut the f**k up now & keep wrestling,” Jericho wrote.
As noted, Tony Khan has also addressed the comments made by Bischoff, explaining that he only amped up the competition because WWE challenged his Friday night time slot.
“I really like Eric and I was kind of surprised by Eric’s comments, because they were coming from Eric Bischoff,” Khan said. “I think Eric Bischoff is probably the last person anyone would expect to say that a President of a wrestling company should be quiet. But when it comes to head-to-head competition, we were in one this past week. It was only 30 minutes and I didn’t ask for it. We were in our time slot, and somebody came into our time slot aggressively. And it wasn’t the first time they’ve made a pretty aggressive move like that. We generally responded pretty well and are very successful. This is the first time on a Friday we’ve gone head to head like that.”
