10 Secrets Behind AEW's Booking Magic

10. Connections

Jon Moxley and Darby Allin are the outliers. AEW is a promotion brimming with stables, teams, and indirect connections. Tony Khan, incidentally, is smart enough to build Moxley and Allin's outsider auras to legitimise their presentation.

At All Out, the Dark Order stable fell to the Nightmare Family: a unit made up of Cody's bloodline, professional colleagues, and friends past and present. Dustin Rhodes; QT Marshall; Matt Cardona; Scorpio Sky: all came together on Cody's behalf to avenge the brutal, seismic events of August 13. Rhodes used his veteran instincts to roll up an overzealous Cabana, earning in the process a shot at Mr. Brodie Lee's TNT Championship - the bloodily emphatic denouement of which AEW will revisit, in the weeks or months to come.

The recent addition of Ricky Starks to Team Taz prolonged the explosion of a Darby Allin Vs. Brian Cage programme that has crackled since May.

Matt Hardy has established natural connections with Private Party and the Elite to help him out in the event that he draws the ire of, say, Eddie Kingston's crew for holding onto that spot for dear life. That pitch materialised with a minute's thought, but that's what happens when the hard work is done to establish a narrative platform.

This method of world-buildin doesn't so much breed organic matches as spawn them, and it's all designed to hook you on the mother fish...