10 Things AEW Wants You To Forget About 2023
1. Tony Khan Sleepwalked Into Every Booking Mistake Ever
A gigantic roster of talent, more than a handful of which have intimated on Twitter or in media interviews that they aren't happy.
An excessive amount of titles for which these wrestlers can compete, rendering too many of them valueless.
Five tiring hours of television - at an absolute minimum - every week.
Because there are several ostensibly major wrestlers, it's not a great idea to have them lose too often, so when they do, it's almost invariably as a result of interference ran by a heel manager or an entire stable.
Also, as covered, the warehouse of talent can't all get pushed at the same time, and thus fan investment wanes.
AEW is still considerably better than every other promotion to have entered a state of decline, but the point remains - you could apply those five italicised sentences to WWE in 2019, and they'd fit. They also describe AEW in 2023.
Again, AEW is miles and miles better than that, but Tony Khan, grappling with that difficult second album after completing his grand plan to turn Hangman Page into the main character, has stumbled into making every mistake every North American promoter always seems to end up making.
More worryingly still, this sort of fire is very difficult to put out. You can't just go back. The situation is too messy and complicated, shaped by ego and fraught politics.