Tony Khan
Appearances
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
As the sporting director, we didn't win the playoff. And I thought we were the better team, and I was frustrated. But I always thought we would go up the next year. We did go up the next year. And this was in May of 2017. I remember feeling terrible and thinking that it was such a disappointment. And it was so much pressure to go up the next year now. And we wouldn't really be able to...
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
play games for a few months, and we're going to have to sit and wait for a few months to start building up again to get back to the same point we were. It was going to take a full year, and it was going to be another year in the championship, and that was really hard. And I... felt really terrible that night and really sick. And that was really hard.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
But other than that, I mean, I still felt like we would do it. I just knew it was going to take another year. And I think that's the way I felt when we've had some of the setbacks. Sometimes when you have a setback, reset your clock. Well, it's going to take a year now to build back to where we just were.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
And thankfully, what we've been able to do is I was about to say, I think the most positive thing that's happened in many years, is we made a great hire with the head coach in 2021 and brought Marco Silva, who had great experience in England. He managed teams. He'd been in the Premier League. I had never worked with him.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
I had only met him for a couple seconds in passing when he was the manager of Everton, when Fulham was playing Everton in 2019. And Then we reconnected on Zoom in 2021, which is very fitting because I see him on Zoom a lot now. And it was such a perfect chemistry. And I have so much respect for Marco. And the team has been able to go to another level.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
So these are things that happened on the road to AEW. But these are a lot of my experiences and things that are still a big part of my life. the NFL and the Premier League, what we do at True Media. And now I work in a sport that's also 52 weeks a year in AEW Pro Wrestling.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
Well, I'll flash back to the in-between. So I had that low point. For me, I felt in 2017, two days of just, and it was not despair. I wasn't thinking we won't be able to do it. It wasn't even a lack of confidence. It was really just the frustration that it's going to take a year to get right back to where we just were. And we had it in our grasp.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
And now it's going to take a year to get to the same point to get back up. And around that same time into the next season, we had a slow start to the 2017 season. And things really picked up in December. And we started a run of winning and a run as an unbeaten team that extended 23 games, which is half a season.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
So we went unbeaten then from the week before Christmas until the final week of the season. And then we ended up winning the playoff final against Aston Villa at Wembley Stadium in May of 2018. And it was so huge. It was a huge part of my life. During that, there was a weekend when I was in Los Angeles. And my business partner, Bernie Cahill, Bernie invited me to a party in Beverly Hills.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
And I saw... A good friend who was Bernie's other best friend was Kevin Riley, who was the president of TBS and TNT at the time. And I found it very interesting what was happening with the media rights in the wrestling business that we'd gotten to a point where there were hundreds of millions of dollars in wrestling TV shows.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
The pay-per-view business and the tickets and the merchandising, these have always been big parts of wrestling, but something changed in the last decade, which is the rights fees for the wrestling shows went up and they became similar to what you'd see for some of the top sports leagues for their game packages. But when you think about it, the wrestling show, it's on 52 weeks a year.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
It's on every week. It's very reliable and draws a great rating. That can be a great thing for a network. And it was really only one company that was producing that product at the time, and that was WWE. In 2018, the rights bees had gone up dramatically. So when I talked to Kevin, I had the light bulb go off. And it occurred to me that somebody could launch a new wrestling promotion.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
And if you could get even a fraction of what the competition would be getting for their rights fees, you could build a promotion based on that. Because really, that was the game-changing thing, was that now there was the potential if you could build a roster of stars and have a great lineup of wrestlers,
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
which I also believed I would be able to assemble in the next year based on the market conditions and who I knew was going to be available in wrestling at that time, just as a fan following wrestling. It all came together very quickly. Kevin showed interest. He did not shoot my idea down.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
I suddenly thought I had something that we could really build and something that we could take to the market and build take all over the world, build an audience with it. TV markets all over the planet, which we have, because now AEW in 2025, we're on over 150 countries now. It's amazing how we've grown the business, but that's really where it started was a conversation
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
It was one of those ideas, you know, when you have an idea that's really good and you think, this is such a good idea. And another thing that was the timing was in 2018... The McMahon family announced they were going to relaunch the XFL. That probably also had an effect on my thinking because that sounded like a terrible idea to me.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
And the amount of money they were going to put into it when the NFL is such a dominant competitor and the NFL is so strong. And I think I was proven right because the league, the XFL, did go bankrupt. And I thought that's not going to work. You know what would work is a second wrestling league. There's way more wrestlers out there to start a second wrestling league.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
If I built a challenger wrestling league, the roster of that league would be so much better comparatively than the roster of the XFL. It wouldn't even be close. And as a viewer of the sports, as somebody who loves football and wrestling, wrestling needs a second league a lot more than football does. And I think we were proven true of that.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
Thank you for having me. It's very kind of you and I'm excited to be on the show and great to see you.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
The market conditions were right. First of all, it wouldn't apply to every person in every situation. This is a very specific thing. It involved a huge war chest. And that meant big startup costs to start this. And thankfully, I was able to go to an investor, which is my father. And now he, in this case, was a very discerning investor. And it was really a big fight to get a launch.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
He didn't think this was going to work like it has.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
I had to show him the opportunities there and also demonstrate that I put a business case together for the plan here because we didn't have a TV deal secured at first.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
I had interest in the show, but I really had to make the commitment, sign up the wrestlers at the start of 2019 and make a huge investment in this business and the wrestlers, the business plan, the marketing and launching a promotion from scratch, which takes tons of capital before we're going to see the returns that now we're seeing as we build this thing and have become a huge TV promotion.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
And now in 2025, also for the first time, a major streaming promotion as our AEW shows stream on Max every week. They're silent cast. And those shows are also live on Max. And we have a whole library of AEW shows people can watch on Max. And when we launched We were a TV promotion and we still are a TV promotion that's on TBS every Wednesday and on TNT every Saturday.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
Growing up as a kid, I was really obsessed with television and exciting television. And sports is, to me, the most exciting television. But I watched a lot of TV and I watched a lot of sports and I watched a lot of cartoons and action shows. So I watched G.I. Joe and the host of G.I. Joe, and he was a character in the show, was Sergeant Slaughter. And Sergeant Slaughter is also a wrestler.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
But we have something really special going now where we are simulcasting as well. And it affords us the ability to find new audience, reach new people that might not have been watching on cable or might not be watching cable at all anymore. And what's really great is there is a great audience on cable. And we've been able to sustain that. We've actually had growth.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
What's amazing is in Q1, we started simulcasting. And Q1 versus Q4, our cable numbers are up in every demo on both shows. And we're simulcasting on Mac. So we've got new viewers streaming. We're one of the top sports streaming shows on the Mac's platform. So really having a great time. It's also just like the quality of the show. That's the business. I'm a wrestling fan. I love the wrestling.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
And as a wrestling producer, our shows have been awesome this year.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
A bunch of people did not. And a lot of people in wrestling had heard hundreds of charlatans come through over the years trying to start another wrestling promotion. It was something people had dreamed of. And it was one of those things where people had really lost faith. So it was hard for me to convince people.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
It was also like at the start of a movie where you're trying to round everyone up and everyone's saying like, no, I'm not going to sign up.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
There was some of that. And there was some people that at first didn't take it seriously. And then when I finally got a few people buying into it, all of a sudden, a lot more people started to take interest in what was to be AEW, this promotion that I was working to launch in 2018 and then announced in 2019. And we launched, did our first shows in 2019. And
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
We celebrated the five-year anniversary of Wednesday Night Dynamite last year, the six-year anniversary of AEW. Our first show, Double or Nothing, is coming up just weeks from now. And the six-year anniversary of Wednesday Night Dynamite is coming up in October.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
Well, so I was in Los Angeles because we had just done a show in Salt Lake City on March 11th of 2020. And it became very apparent on March 11th of 2020 that everything was going to be shutting down. And probably our March 18th show... that we'd been planning to have in the Northeast was probably not going to happen.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
We had a series of events in Rochester and Newark, some major events that were canceled and then moved to Jacksonville, Florida, where we did the shows instead. And I did some soul searching. I went to what I would call a dark place to figure out
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
what people were doing in entertainment, what you would do if you switched off the audience, which is not something I had to think of, and it was a problem-solving exercise. I watched stuff outside of wrestling. I watched some small wrestling studio shows, but they still had a small audience, but they weren't the big arena shows like we had been doing.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
I thought that was interesting, and that is a callback to the wrestling I grew up on. As a tape trader, a lot of great Southern wrestling was like that. And then I started to watch what other people in TV did under environmental challenges. I thought there were some great shows David Letterman did during the hurricane.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
So that helped me start to watch wrestling. I also watched The A-Team, which is a great show. I don't know if you watched The A-Team, but it was a fantastic show.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
And it was like, just Dave and the camera guys, they didn't even have the guys in the booth to do the top 10 graphics. So the guys were doing the top 10 list with cue cards in front of Dave's desk. And it was just Dave and Denzel Washington. And I watched that and I was like, okay, I think that worked really well because that was David Letterman and Denzel Washington.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
I basically took away, I was like, I was captivated by those two guys and he stripped everything down and he didn't lose anything. And it actually put the focus on David Letterman and Denzel Washington. The problem with that is that only works if you have Denzel Washington. I thought they were fantastic, but I also thought you'd be crazy for anyone else to try what they did.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
Then I watched Stephen Colbert in the pandemic, his shows, which were that week. The Letterman shows I were watching were like, you know, at the time, probably eight years old. Now they would be like 13 years old. And the Stephen Colbert shows I thought were very interesting because he was trying to do something similar. And I thought he's a great comedian, but he was trying to tell jokes.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
in an empty studio. And I thought it was challenging. And it's interesting because it's like, he's talking to the camera, he's talking to the people at home, but there's nobody to react. And for a comedian, it helps to gear the laughter for the jokes. And I think there's a similarity between wrestling and comedy because there's a lot of subjectivity. There's an art to it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
There is definitely skill. There's people that are far better at the craft than others, even though there's a subjectivity than who's better than, you know, than who's the best.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
Yeah, absolutely. And hearing the live crowd, it's a big part of it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
I think that it's interesting because when I watched the Colbert show that first week of the lockdown, there was nobody in the studio to react to the joke. So then I watched what Jimmy Fallon was doing and I thought that was really interesting because he had the crew and people from the office
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
behind the camera, so it sounded like maybe a dozen or maybe even a couple dozen people in the studio, and it sounded like a small comedy club. I thought that was the closest thing, and I really thought the spirit of that was right. So I decided to do the same thing, and I would take the crew of my show and have
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
Yeah, sure. First was a great show. That's not as much the stuff I was into, though. I did like some cartoons. I like more superheroes, the Justice League, Super Friends, but also a lot of action shows like The A-Team, which was a great show. And... Hulk Hogan was a character that appeared sometimes as Hulk Hogan on the A-Team.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
Some of the wrestlers that weren't wrestling that night, some of the crew that weren't being put to work at that moment, and have them sit around the ring and react to the matches. And then we'd have an audience, even though you couldn't sell tickets in the lockdown. So we never stopped. We never took a week off. AEW ran every week through the pandemic. And we never put a rerun on.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
It was like a period that is known by the wrestling fans as being a really great period at AEW, where the company really focused and delivered. And it's considered a golden era of AEW wrestling by our fans. And it was an area and a time where we really set ourselves apart and closed the business gap. We came out of the lockdown a lot stronger than we went into it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
I use an analogy for people that watch Star Trek. In Star Trek II, the original Rathacon, there's a nebula. And it's a terrible place. And you won't be able to use your radar. You won't be able to use your shields. Your weapons won't work. Nothing's going to work. But... It is like that for everybody.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
So if you're the challenger and you're the underdog, then you're better off in there because then it comes down to skill and acumen and creativity and really strips down a lot of those things. So that's how I felt about the lockdown, that it really opened it up for us where we could explore new ideas, try new things.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
And we would have this really exciting period that went from March of 2020 until the summer of 2021. And then when we went back on tour in the summer of 2021, we were in a much better place than we went into lockdown. We came out far stronger. So that was really exciting.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
Yeah, Ring of Honor was a company that was a challenger brand. They weren't the biggest company in wrestling, but they built a great tradition of wrestling. And they had built great momentum right as we were launching AEW, honestly. And the launch of AEW did slow down Ring of Honor. And then in the lockdown, Ring of Honor ended up shutting down completely.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
And he was supposed to be a friend who was in Vietnam with Mr. T, which is pretty unbelievable in hindsight, given their ages and time with this show. But AEW was something that I dreamed of for many, many years. I grew up as a kid loving pro wrestling. I started watching TV as a kid. I had a TV in my room and my parents had a satellite dish in the backyard in the 80s.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
And in 2021, they ceased operations and they were a company that was really hardly hit by the lockdown. And Sinclair, broadcasting was looking to sell the company. And so I did purchase it from them. And it's a great company with a great history. It frankly never reached the heights of AEW. And it was a great challenger brand with a great history that I have a ton of respect for.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
Some of the greatest wrestlers of all time competed in Ring of Honor. And I thought it was a cool thing to keep a lot of those people wrestling. There were some people that were contracted to Ring of Honor that I brought in as part of
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
The agreement, there were some people that I wanted to use a lot, like the Briscoes, that I was able to start to work with and get to know, and the friends I've made and lost along the way. But I do think it's another thing that I'm really excited to bolt on here now as we're in the streaming era. It gives more resources. We've put the AEW library on mass.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
And we have tons of options now to build out, build more things, fast channels, and exciting possibilities and ways I can leverage the history of AEW and also the history of Ring of Honor to create new content. And also, Ring of Honor has great history. They have great champions, great wrestlers. So yeah, I was happy to keep it alive.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
And like I said, it never reached the heights that we have here with AEW, but it's a great promotion and it has a great voice and a great history.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
I think the hardest things that have happened have been friends that we've lost along the way. There have been, in two cases, wrestlers that I was very close with and people that were beloved by our locker room that we've lost. In AEW, Mr. Brodie Lee.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
who is a beloved wrestler in AEW and all over the world of wrestling and had been known to all the fans and all the wrestlers all over the world and left behind a beautiful family and honoring him. was a great challenge. And I think the company put our best foot forward to honor our greatest champion and his family.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
And Mr. Brody Lee left behind a great legacy and putting a tribute that is befitting that legacy and the man that he is and was and the family that he's left here with us. It's one of the hardest things we've ever had to do. And I think That is one of the most important things we've ever done. We also then, in Ring of Honor, lost the late, great Jay Briscoe.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
And when I acquired Ring of Honor, the Briscoe brothers were its greatest stars. And they're a tag team of brothers. They are closer friends. than anybody could ever imagine. They had a bond of brotherhood that extended into the wrestling ring that brought them even closer together because they're brothers and they're tag team partners and best friends.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
And Mark Briscoe is a huge part of AEW and ring of honor history. And Mark Briscoe came from ring of honor. And now he's a huge part of AEW and his brother, Jay Briscoe never got the chance to be part of AEW. I was very honored to work with him. And, uh, losing friends like Jay Briscoe and Mr. Brody Lee along the way, and then that we're all responsible for honoring them and their legacy.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
I think that's challenging, but also an important responsibility that we have. So that's probably been the hardest challenges along the way is when you work with people that you lose.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
yeah i mean these are very upsetting things and whenever you lose somebody that's in your life you're going to take it and there's a lot of different takeaways but i mean a lot of bad things yeah and uh i'm sure you've worked with people over the years that you've lost and had friends that you've lost and friends at work and it can be really hard and those are people that the wrestling fans really respected and people that everyone out
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
Our companies really respect and I really respect it and people I really liked in both cases. So those are really hard challenges along the way. There's business challenges. And when you're dealing with an aggressive competitor like we are, who is, I think,
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
I mean, it's important to note, I think one of the really cool things about the success of AEW is that AEW is a challenger brand competing in an industry where the industry leader historically has been the most adept company at crippling and smashing their competitors in the history of business.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
So, AEW's existence in this industry signifies not only the Challenger brand, which is really cool, an alternative, which is really cool, but we're doing great things. We're having a lot of fun, and we exist. And our mere existence signifies
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
speaks to the fact that we've been able to do something very special that actually nobody has ever been able to do in terms of the competition, in terms of the hikes we've hit and what we continue to do with AEW. We exist in the face of the most aggressive, dominant business competitor in the history of business. No business competitor has faced more different challengers from different regions
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
No, my parents liked sports. I grew up in Champaign, Illinois, and the University of Illinois sports are a huge part of living in central Illinois. People follow Illinois football and basketball really closely. So I grew up watching a lot of football and basketball, especially the Illini, but also the NFL and the NBA and followed other sports too, baseball and soccer and other things.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
in different parts of the world, particularly concentrated around the U.S., and not just one part of the U.S., the southern, southeastern United States, Minnesota, Canada, all these places. They effectively smashed the competition place after place after place successfully with a hammer and done incredibly well and thrived in doing so.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
And this has been going on for over 40 years since before I was alive. And it's really cool to exist in the face of it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
Well, you have to build credibility. And the best way to do that is to find a way to get your foot in the door. And that's the hardest part is getting your foot in the door. And that's really, I had started doing so and being able to get into the NFL. So I've been able to take advantage of the opportunities that I've been given and make the most of the openings.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
And that's all they really were in all these cases was openings. Nobody was asking me to start an analytics department at the Jaguars. It's something I always really wanted to do. And I think it was a need. that the team had that we were able to fill.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
So I think if you can find a need or a role that you can fill to somebody of great importance, then that is the best way to get your foot in the door in any industry. And if you can find a way to make yourself useful or important to somebody who's important and makes markets or makes opinions, then you have the ability to get your foot in the door.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
Yeah, there's no office in a wrestling. So we do shows 52 weeks a year. So like that's the tier. We used to travel a ton. It is a serious undertaking because we do just on TV, 104 shows, not including the pay-per-views, 104 events. And that's just wrestling. That's before I touch on football. And I've never missed a show. I've been in every AEW show we've ever done. Wow.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
And to do 104 TV shows plus nine pay-per-views, a handful of other major live events, it's a lot. So over 110 wrestling events a year, plus I'm at all the Jaguars games. Unless there's some major conflict, you can count on one hand all the games I've missed in 13 years at the Jaguars. I come over as much as I can to Fulham and... Yeah, it's a lot.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
The travel is a big piece of it, but just really staying on top of everything is a lot of fun. You know, as a sports fan, a wrestling fan, a football fan, it's easy in that sense.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
Yeah, because that's what I would be doing anyway. So there's a lot to it, but that's basically what it is, Alana, is it doesn't because I love it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
And I really grew up as a big fan of wrestling above all else, as a huge sports fan collecting cards. But the one sport that never ends, there's no off season. It goes 365 days a year, does not take a break. 52 weeks a year of pro wrestling. There's no reruns. It's new wrestling every week. And that really, as you're a big sports fan kid, can keep you hooked on that.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
Well, I'm very fortunate. I think I was born on third base and I've stolen home several times to where I've scored a lot of runs where I was able to take advantage. So I've stolen home at least seven or eight times now. Thankfully, I was put in the game at a very advantageous position, but then I've been able to make the most of the opportunities I've been given every time.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
And I think that's the best advice I can give is make the most of the opportunities you're given. I was dealt a really good hand and then played it really well time after time after time. And I think even if you're not dealt the best hand, hopefully you'll be able to find a way to make the most of the hand you are dealt and get a better hand and work with it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
So I can't give advice that applies to everybody because my situation is very, very unique. And I realized that a lot of the advice I'm giving probably doesn't apply to 99.999% of people.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
If you do find yourself with an opening though, especially if there's a way to do it without totally unethically shanking someone in the back or doing something I don't want to do, then, you know, it's always great if you can find a way to take that opportunity and make the most of it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
I wouldn't change anything. I'd be afraid of changing a single thing. I don't want to butterfly and affect myself and not sit on that plane next to Bernie, not run into Kevin that night. So I wouldn't change a thing. I wouldn't want to mess with the past. So I have no advice for my younger self. Remember to steal your dad's keys like Bill and Ted.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
No, I don't actually have any time traveling advice.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
Thank you for having me. I really appreciate you having me on. It's very kind and I really enjoyed spending time. You're such a great interviewer and not only inquisitive, but made me feel very at home here. So thanks a lot. I really enjoyed it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
So when the NFL goes on break after the Super Bowl and when college basketball breaks after March Madness, you don't really get that 52-week-a-year chance to really follow something you love. And wrestling does offer that.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
My dad is a very successful businessman. And as I was growing up, he was really building his business day by day, week by week. And there was a lot of work he put into it, but he was also away working a lot. So I did see my dad as much as he could, but he was... working hard building his business up and traveling the world.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
When you have a setback, reset your clock.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
And my dad is a big sports fan, took me to games, built his auto parts empire, and started companies, built new factories all over the world, and eventually was able to buy the NFL's Jacksonville Jaguars in 2012. And it was many years building towards that. But when I was growing up as a little kid, it seemed like an impossibility.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
But definitely my dad always loved football as far as I remember and was great about taking me to sports when he was around.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
Yeah, I definitely had some pressure from my parents to do something of significance in their eyes. There was academic pressure, but also pressure to go out and do something important at work. So I really love my parents very much. And they're very hardworking people and very smart people, but they are very motivated and they motivated me.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
Well, I changed majors at the University of Illinois. I was in engineering school. For me, yeah, I always thought I would go into business and I was in engineering school and it's a lot of work. And I was having a lot of fun in college and also doing things like writing wrestling shows for fun and trading wrestling tapes and posting on wrestling message boards and watching lots of basketball.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
The Illinois basketball team was really, really good when I was there and watching lots of football and going to the football games. And it was a lot of work in engineering school and also a lot of the stuff I really wanted to learn, I was learning in my minor, which was finance. And they called it the secondary field of concentration. So my secondary field, I found far more interesting.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
AEW is a challenger brand competing in an industry where the industry leader historically has been the most adept company at crippling and smashing their competitors in the history of business. I found it very interesting what was happening with the media rights in the wrestling business.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
And also I found that I could manage my studies and still do all the other things I wanted to do and be a solid student, but also go out several days a week
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
I was so much happier instantly. I enjoyed the classes more. I had so much more free time and I saw my friends more and it was fantastic. I learned things that I apply more and I took a few years of the engineering classes. I have an insane amount of math credits. for somebody that graduated with the degree I have. So I could go back and do something with them sometime.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
I don't know if I ever will now.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
But yeah, I had done a lot of the work already before I switched. But no, I'm really glad to do it. And I was much happier and I was happy with the degree.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
Not long after I got out of college, my father was trying to buy a football team. So I graduated in 2007. And months later, I was following the St. Louis Rams because my dad was trying to buy the St. Louis Rams. And the thing I was spending most of my time on at that point was studying sports statistics. And then my father spent a couple more years working to get in the NFL. And then
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
Less than two years later, he announced that he would be buying Jacksonville Jaguars, which was over 13 years ago. And I'm here in Jacksonville, Florida now. And that's when I moved from Illinois to Florida. And I've been here ever since. And we launched AEW here in Florida, but I still live there.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
and go back to Illinois anytime I can. Yeah, it was not long after college where I started working on sports statistics. I had a job in biofuels as a day job, but really the thing I went back and worked on every night was studying NFL statistics and applying them.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
I started working there in 2012. As soon as my father bought the team, there was not a sports analytics department there. And I'd been studying it for several years. And I began bringing in some of the top vendors. Now this is standard practice for all 32 teams. And there's a huge...
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
amount of work that's done on all 32 teams with machine learning and football research looking at all the plays researching all the personnel scouting game data and that's a huge part of nfl preparation now preparation for the draft for free agency for the upcoming games against your opponents it's a huge part of football and people have been building up staffs in recent years
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
The rights fees for the wrestling shows went up, and it was really only one company that was producing that product at the time, and that was WWE. It occurred to me that somebody could launch a new wrestling promotion. Now, AEW, in 2025, we're on over 150 countries now.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
The Jaguars were one of the first teams to really build that. And now we have a great infrastructure. And what's really great is we have a young group of executives that's really applying it. We have a very young coach and a young general manager, and they're very data-driven guys.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
And it's a stark contrast to when I came into the organization in 2012, as far as the uptake and the interest in the football research and all of it. analytics and applying the data into making personnel decisions and studying the game.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
A lot. The Jaguars, I went in in 2012. And around that time, my father had announced the purchase in January 2012, but he'd been working on it for a couple years after the Rams purchased. It was stopped in 2010. So I'd spent about four years studying football stats pretty much every day. And I put together what was the football technology group that still existed at the Jaguars.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
I still am an employee of the Jaguars. And... still work in that research group and really enjoy it. We just got done with the draft and it's the most data-driven group of decision-makers we've ever had. Somewhere in that time, my father also bought the football club in the Premier League. I had never worked in Premier League or around English football at all. That was happening around that time.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
away from me and then here at the jaguars here in jacksonville i was do hiring a lot of vendors the best vendor i hired actually was a pair of guys out of boston that ran a small business where it was two guys and they had another person so it's really two founders plus one employee so three people total there's still with us to this day
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
And the two founders put together some really exciting technology and some very, very cool analytics research. And I found that their tools, the reports that they gave us were just fantastic. And I asked them if they were interested in working together and building a bigger relationship. And they said they would really be interested if I would invest in their business and help them grow it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
And I was interested in that too. So I did. And that was in 2014. And within a year, I bought the business outright and became the 100% owner of True Media Networks. We're the largest and best sports analytics engineering firm in the world. The CEO, Rafe Anderson, and the president and head of technology, Jeff Stern. They are absolutely fantastic people.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
I've been working with them for now forever. about 13 years since my first year here at the Jaguars. And I've been the chairman of the company for over 10 years now and really love working with them. And we built a great business where we service 25 out of the 30 major league baseball clubs, ESPN, New York Times, and any football clubs in the NFL and in Europe.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
And in doing that, I learned a lot about growing a business. As we were growing that business, I was following what was happening with Fulham very closely. The team had some very tough times in 2014. 14, 15. And I started to take more interest and wanted to get more involved. And the team was relegated. The first year, my father bought it from the Premier League.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
Well, you have to build credibility and the best way to do that is.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
The second year, they finished 17th in the English Football Championship, which is the second division of English football, which was very scary. And you can be very interested in sports analytics. And as I've seen, whether it was at the Jaguars or those first couple of years at Fulham, you can have really good analytics, people making good suggestions or good
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
Really in any business, there can be somebody smart in a business that's making good suggestions, but it has to be applied by the people making the decisions because you can get really good research and recommendations, but if they're not being applied, then... It's useless. Yeah, really. They're interesting. They can be interesting after the fact.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
But if that information isn't being applied to the product or to the team or whatever it is, then it's not that helpful. So in the summer of 2016, I took over managing the transfers. And we totally changed the team. It was a new team and the results got much better. Years later, we'd gotten much more successful. We had gotten back up to the Premier League.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
We've had some success, but then had not gotten relegated. We had gotten back up and gotten relegated again.