Eric Bischoff talks about Tony Khan and his handling of the situation between CM Punk and The Elite.
Since founding All Elite Wrestling in 2019, Tony Khan has had plenty of critics within the confines of the wrestling business. Although he has appeared on AEW programming in the past, Eric Bischoff is frequently a critic of Khan and how he runs All Elite Wrestling.
Recently, Tony Khan fired back at Bischoff for comments he made about having matches for the sake of having matches. In a new interview with Fightful, Bischoff responded to Khan.
"I think what Tony says is funny. Because he reminds me of a fifteen year old kid that’s got too much money and doesn’t know what to do with it and he’s running around, bouncing off walls trying to make some sense out of stuff. Look, I never said that every match on every show needs to have a story. But your top three or four should and I encouraged Tony, who has an employee by the name of Kevin Sullivan, who was formerly a director in TNA. Not the booker. Two different Kevin Sullivans. Kevin Sullivan, the producer and the director, works for Tony, and Kevin Sullivan has a show bible that I created for Spike TV, Viacom while I was there."
Bischoff continued on and provided some clarification regarding his criticisms of the product.
"I would encourage Tony to look at that because it really illustrates to someone who’s never done it before how you make sure you’re A story, your B story, your C story, your D story all have structure and all carry out over the course of three or four months. Then your stories underneath that, your opening matches, your mid-card matches where you’re introducing your talent or trying to establish talent that has yet to be established. They don’t necessarily need to have a back story. You can just bring people out and just showcase them. That’s fine as long as you have legitimate story and well structured story for your top four matches. That’s what I’ve said all along. But Tony has a tendency to ricochet off walls and say stupid shit because he doesn’t really understand much about the industry really. He’s a wrestling fan with a lot of money. It’s a $100,000,000 vanity project. Good for him. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be Tony Khan. Who wouldn’t want to have a $100,000,000 or $1,000,0000,000 to go play in whatever sandbox you want to play in. Then, of course, you’re not going to want to be criticized by people who have done it before. But that’s just human nature, I guess."
Bischoff was also asked in the interview if AEW can potentially make money off of CM Punk and The Elite's real life tension. Bischoff noted that he was hesitant to give a solid answer on the question, but ultimately circled back to criticizing Khan's handling of the situation.
"I don’t know if you can make money off of it because now—and I don’t know a lot about it, so I’m hesitant to comment on it just because there’s so much I don’t know—from what we all know, because I don’t know more than you all do watching from the outside, there’s a lack of leadership. When you’ve got that much turmoil amongst that many different people and it’s manifest to your audience, and you got talent that you’re paying millions and millions and millions of dollars to, and they’re coming out and showing their ass in a national media scrum and calling out the owner of the company and calling out other people in the company, to me, that’s a reflection on leadership or lack thereof. How would I handle it? I don’t know, man. I don’t know. I wouldn’t have put myself in that position to begin with. If you remember, you may not have paid any attention, but I made a comment one day months before all that went down, I said, ‘CM Punk’s gonna be the biggest financial flop in the wrestling business.’ It stirred up all kinds of stuff. Tony Khan’s hair caught on fire. He’s babbling like a fucking idiot. He was so upset about it. Three months later, here we are. So I wouldn’t have put myself in that position."
Bischoff recently commented on the notion that he is a hypocrite for criticizing Khan and his booking of the AEW product. To see his full comments from an October edition of 83 Weeks, click here.
Elsewhere in the interview, Bischoff commented on how the business has changed over the years. To learn more, click here.
