10 Things We Learned Attending AEW Dynasty 2025 Live

The moments the cameras might not have picked up from fans and wrestlers alike.

Kenny Omega
Scott Carlson/WhatCulture

All Elite Wrestling brought its tour de force to Philadelphia Sunday night with Dynasty, holding its first PPV in the City of Brotherly Love.

More than 7,500 fans filled the Liacouras Center, and WhatCulture was represented in the audience, providing for some on-the-ground observations from this “B-show” PPV.

With 10 matches on the PPV card and a runtime of four-and-a-half hours, even the most energetic and passionate wrestling fans waned throughout the evening, but the crowd stuck it out right up until the end – when the main event sucked the air out of the arena.

Still, Dynasty certainly didn’t “kill the town,” nor did the fans do anything to warrant Tony Khan going back on his post-PPV pledge to bring more AEW programming to Philly in the near future.

Watching a PPV in person in a somewhat intimate arena allows a different perspective – rather than grading match quality, cataloguing botches, and rating contests with “ups” and “downs,” it’s a lot easier to get swept up in the emotion of the moment and walking away with positive vibes from even the more pedestrian matches.

That’s not to say that everything was peaches and cream Sunday night, but the vibes were mostly positive throughout the show… until things went off the rails.

Let’s get to it…

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Contributor
Contributor

Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.