AEW Talents Refusing To Carry Out Tony Khan's Creative

Tony Khan's authority as the booker of All Elite Wrestling looks to be under threat on a weekly basis.

Khan has headed up AEW booking since the promotion was founded in 2019, taking on more power at the end of that year. The AEW President is struggling to execute his plans on AEW programming, however, as lots of talents are refusing to do what Khan has planned for them, according to a report from Bryan Alvarez on Wrestling Observer Live. 

It is said to be a "whirlwind" putting together an episode of AEW TV between talents not knowing what they are doing until the day of the show and others simply refusing to do what is asked of them. As expected, this has led to a lot of frustration behind the scenes. 

"I don't want to compare this to like WWE back in the day but it is very, very much like that and a lot of people are very frustrated because they don't find out the Tuesday before. Some people do, some people will know what they're doing because there are a couple of matches usually advertised in advance. But most people are showing up the day of the show and finding out if they are doing anything or not. There's very little communication. I've been hearing about this for months, people are very frustrated. They show up, 'Here's what you're gonna do'. Lots of people will complain and it gets changed which is also a big problem I hear about all the time. People don't want to do something and Tony doesn't make them do it. There's a lot of this,"  Alvarez said. 

"People aren't gonna come forward and talk about it publicly, they will someday. This is one of those things where people will say I'm wrong now and then someday people are going to talk and you'll realise that I'm actually not wrong. I hear about this every single day. Trying to put together these shows is just a whirlwind of 'Will this person do this? They don't want you? What can we do? Will you do it?'. There's a lot, a lot, a lot, of frustration. There's also injuries that he deals with and no there's not shows put together a week in advance or two weeks in advance. The days of long-term booking, they're gone," he continued.

"He has an idea. I'm sure he had a card for the pay-per-view but as far as week to week how they get there, every week is like what are we going to do this week? He wants to do things but people don't want to go along with it, people are hurt. Whatever."

Although backstage morale is said to have improved overall over the past several months, talent also find themselves frustrated over AEW's poor ticket sales and the rosy picture Tony Khan continues to portray publicly. 

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