How Tony Khan's Biggest Mistake Will Change AEW Forever

AEW pay-per-views work so well because they feel like true premium events; even if the quarterly model remains in place, five hours of televised programming poses a risk of content fatigue. Rampage is already dead. Battle of the Belts didn't even come to life.

CM Punk is a pro wrestling genius, but he's flawed, has self-destructed many times already, turns 45 this year, and is increasingly prone to injury. A CM Punk on his best behaviour, even in the unlikely event that he makes amends with the locker room, is not someone to build around. If he burns out or gets injured or throws another molotov cocktail over the promotion, AEW is left with two hours of primetime TV without his presence. The show is happening with or without him, as was always the plan, but a combustible situation becomes a boring one without him. It's too hyperbolic to state that no good can come of this. Two more hours will allow for the greener wrestlers to get more reps, for AEW to finally get moving on under-developed characters like Konosuke Takeshita. What if Khan allows the Elite and Punk to format each two-hour show around their respective visions? That's an awesome prospect, but a bit of a pipe dream. The man has always insisted that he can carry the load.

There are positives to AEW's imminent Content Farm era, but the days of an agonising wait for Wednesday to come around will die - if we're not there already.

Tony Khan likes to take his time. Perhaps this split is in place to make it feel like a transgression when Punk or the Elite "invade" the other show. Perhaps Khan is hoping naively that this will happen organically over time. Perhaps he's burying his head in the sand.

But say Punk and the Elite finally do come to blows, and work a programme over a span of months that is as good as every AEW fan wants it to be: then what?

More Content, that's what. More content, less meaning. With its title inflation, repetitive gauntlet storylines, frequent bloodletting, interference, "shock" debuts and the like, AEW is already a very excessive promotion - so much so that even great matches are less special than they used to be. Two more hours of it, and great goes from good to possibly even average, and there is nowhere else to go.

'Collision' might well prove to be too apt or ironic a name; no collision between the Elite and CM Punk, but rather an ugly collision between art and content, with content "stealing one".