Paul Heyman has revealed he has no problem giving credit when it’s due to AEW as he thinks the upstart company has a long way to go to reach the levels of WWE.
Heyman has long been known as the mad professor of wrestling, going from the lynchpin of an alliance in WCW to leading an extreme revolution against the industry’s top two companies in the nineties. For the best part of two decades, however, Paul Heyman has been a mainstay of the WWE juggernaut and after signing a new deal with the company he will be for years to come.
However, Paul Heyman has no issues discussing things that many others might shirk away from and that is true of wrestling’s newest ‘second’ company, AEW.
Speaking to Richard Deitsch on the Sports Media podcast, Paul Heyman says he doesn’t mind being complimentary about AEW when there’s reason to be because they aren’t anywhere near WWE in terms of success:
“I have no problem putting AEW over if AEW does things that’s worth being put over. I don’t live in a bubble. I would also offer to anybody that wonders why I would be so willing to put over the competition…if you look at WrestleMania and you look at the fact that over the course of these two days, WWE has sold more tickets, and I have to call the two nights one event, we sold more tickets to this event, this WrestleMania than any other event in WWE history. Combine the two nights.”
“With that in mind, and the spectacle that this show will be, and you combine that with the worldwide publicity that it’s going to garner and the fact that the entire industry is focused on what’s going to happen at WrestleMania and therefore what comes out of WrestleMania, I would argue the case that I could sit here and praise AEW all day long, they can’t match what we’re about to do [at WrestleMania].”
“Until they are in a position to match what we do [at WrestleMania], I’m not that concerned with praising the competition because they are still a long way away from what we do and our level of success and our market dominance.”
Paul Heyman then revealed that he does watch AEW, but put a wrestling ring in any corner of the globe and there’s a good chance that Heyman has his eye on it:
“Do I watch AEW? of course I do, but I also watch everything else that’s out there as well. If I can get my hands on Buenos Aires Championship wrestling, I’d watch it. if I can get my hands on Antarctica All-Star Wrestling, if there is such a thing, I’d watch it. I watch anything to do with this industry.”