Tony Khan Addresses Eric Bischoff's Claim That CM Punk Is The Biggest Financial Flop In Pro Wrestling History

AEW President Tony Khan responded to Eric Bischoff's viewpoint that CM Punk has to be the biggest financial flop in professional wrestling history in an expletive-laden rant during the post-Double Or Nothing media scrum.

Upon Punk being asked about Bischoff's comments, Khan immediately interjected with "that's f*****g bulls**t" before he added: "No one wrestler has ever come in and made a bigger plus delta financial difference in the history of my company going into the third-year anniversary, going into year four. No one person has ever made a more positive impact.

"He's done a four pay-per-view cycle now, every one of them was the record, whether it was All Out where he was a huge part of the draw with Darby [Allin] and his debut, of course, is a huge thing from The First Dance. The biggest Rampage draw in the history of that show. The matches, he carried the Friday Night War. Which by the way is a matter of record in f*****g court in the state of California that we won the Friday Night War, just ask Jerry McDevitt because he f*****g wrote it!

"This guy won it vs. Matt Sydal who's a great wrestler, he had another goddamn great match on Friday night. This f*****g guy, he f*****g did the Friday Night War, he did The First Dance, he's done the record Double Or Nothing, he did the record All Out in his debut! He was a big part of a record Full Gear, a great match with Eddie Kingston. And f*****g, he's wrestled a bunch of young guys, a bunch of veterans in between there, Powerhouse Hobbs, Daniel Garcia goddamnit. And then he showed up, did the biggest programme in terms of everything, TV, box office, ever with MJF, and then he did the goddamn main event here. He's the biggest part of financial success in the history of this company. Let's f*****g go!"

The Friday Night War took place back on October 15, 2021, when AEW Rampage and WWE Friday Night SmackDown went head-to-head for 30 minutes due to a supersized episode of WWE's show on FS1. All Elite Wrestling beat WWE in the key 18-49 demographic, averaging 328,000 viewers to WWE's 285,000. SmackDown, meanwhile, averaged more total viewers with 878,000 compared to Rampage's 602,000.

AEW have also had strong pay-per-view buys since Punk returned to professional wrestling with Wrestlenomics noting that All Out drew 205,000 buys, Full Gear had 145,000, and Revolution attracted 170,000 buys, all bettering the previous year's shows.