When Tony Khan decided to launch AEW, he recalls an early conversation with the president of TBS/TNT – PWMania

AEW President Tony Khan recently appeared on Locked on NFL where he spoke about a number of topics including when he decided to launch the promotion and how he came up with the idea to do so since 2018 after a brief conversation with then-TNT/ TBS president Kevin Reilly, who told Khan that he had previously bid on media rights for WWE before WWE ended up with FOX.

Khan said: “It’s something I started working on in 2018. The idea of ​​launching AEW brought many things together, and I believed that by early 2019 there would be enough great wrestlers available to launch a wrestling league. I started working on this in April 2018. I was at a party in Beverly Hills on a Friday evening. I saw my friend who was president of TBS and TNT at the time (Kevin Reilly). I walked over and visited him for a while and said, “Kevin, are you planning on bidding for wrestling TV rights?” He was, and he wanted to bid on SmackDown. He told me what he was willing to pay, he said, $150 to $175 million a year. I follow the industry closely, so I knew it would cost over $200 million, and it did. I said, ‘I don’t know if that will work. For a lot less than that, we could launch a new wrestling league on TNT and eventually TBS.” That’s what happened.”

You can watch the full podcast below.

(H/T to Fightful for transcribing the above quotes)