AEW are here to stay
by Peter Edge
"Once you're profitable, the term 'money mark' goes out of the window
So, the worst kept secret in wrestling since who the main attraction of the First Dance was has been revealed. Wednesday 2nd October saw Warner Brothers Discovery and AEW reveal that they extended their relationship in a multi year deal.
It was the day that Tony Khan had envisioned when he dreamt up the idea of All Elite Wrestling. As discussed in my History of AEW piece to coincide with the 5 year anniversary of AEW’s first show on Memorial Day weekend in 2019, TK when seeing that a professional wrestling company has secured a deal worth a billion over a 5-year stretch, those years of fantasy booking when growing up became a real life practice and while AEW is his labour of love/passion project/fun job, the goal was always to get a television deal to make this labour/project/job a profitable one and when the signatures on the contracts were completed, that objective was realised.
While October 3rd might be best known as International Mean Girls Day to us fans of the movie, October 3rd might now be the known as the day anti-AEW grifters need to cope with the news that their “predictions” that AEW were doomed to fail was a worst take than those that thought the Millennium Bug was going to be a thing.
The thing is that you didn't need to have the ability to be psychic as your fifth sense to know that the day was coming that the deal was signed that for three more years (plus the one extra that I think will probably be optioned) and that on Wednesdays we will watch wrestling for the foreseeable future and while people pointed at the board that showed that ratings are decreased from the year before, that tells half the story.
With their placement in the nightly cable rankings at a consistent Top 5 placing, the worth of AEW is there to see hence the increase in fees that WBD have paid to their partners. That worth has seen tie-ins such as Shark Week, The Game Thrones link, the DC Comics cameos and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre match. Ok, that last one wasn't a great example in terms of artistic creativity but the money that came to AEW through that match made that terrible 15 minutes of wrestling television worth it to Tony Khan….. just
Even if the five years that some expected didn't come, the option year after the initial three will probably be picked up unless something very stupid happens in the next 36 months and whether a 4 year deal is good or not in a sports rights market that is unpredictable right now is a story for another time. The relationship between AEW and WBD is such that confidence would surely be high that the next round of negotiations should be as undramatic as these negotiations were. Certainly less of an unknown than the WWE/Netflix relationship that will start in January 2025 (more on that on a later column)
But with the future of the AEW/WBD known, we still need to talk about the elephant in the room. The elephant being FOX.
With a trademark application of Shockwave made by AEW and the rumours of AEW and FOX getting into business. Is this the deal that makes a supersonic change of momentum for AEW?
First, let's talk about the money side of this potential deal. It will obviously not be as much as the WWE made in 2018. The reason Smackdown is now on USA Network is that FOX felt they paid too much for the “blue brand show” six years ago and that advertisement money wasn't of that expected and not comparable to what they have got the past few weeks with the college football games shown on FOX in the Friday night slot.
A good comparable is the deal FOX struck with Indycar this year to show the open wheel racing league (and the second most popular American racing league behind NASCAR) on the channel. Its 5 year, $25 million a year deal is the benchmark we should look at any deal AEW will make with FOX.
Just a note, when you look at the Indycar TV deal and compare it to NASCAR’s rights deal of $7.7 billion over 7 years and you look how that sizes up compared to AEW’s $555 million over 3 years and WWE’s 4 billion over 5, it makes the AEW look even better.
Not bad for No.2 promotion.
In all, the extension of the relationship between WBD and AEW shows that AEW are now the second most successful wrestling company in history. To say that 7 years ago when WWE’s attempted monopolisation of pro wrestling had been successful and to say that in 2020 when WWE had thrown everything but the kitchen sink (and looking at WWE’s plans in December of this year that kitchen sink might be thrown then) at AEW and when the pandemic made life for AEW difficult with no chance to tour the country would have been a ridiculous statement to make and while AEW haven’t had a 83 week period of time as the highest rated wrestling company on tv but with April 16, 2025 the date when Dynamite overtakes Nitro’s longevity and it’s all but certain we’ll hit that date and also that this tv deal means that AEW will in all likelihood have multiple financial years that will be profitable. WCW had just the one (1998)
Journalist David Bixenspan asked on his twitter years ago how many wrestling promoters had been successful with the take from Bix that only one had been successful (the man that had a documentary made about him on Netflix) but in a land where there is a mass grave of promoters careers, Tony Khan might actually be the second one to end up being a success. Not bad for a “money mark”
Is that why Eric Bischoff and Jim Cornette, both failed wrestling promoters, are so wedded to the anti-AEW grift?
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