Paul Heyman says his opinion on AEW shouldn’t be any concern to the promotion, and their mission should be focused on bringing in as many fans as they can.
Paul Heyman recently spoke with Ariel Helwani for BT Sport and was asked about competition in the professional world and how it created a dynamic that some fans haven’t seen in some time. Heyman said he’s not sure it’s more fun than without competition, but it does at least create an interesting conversation between fans.
“I don’t know if there’s a lack of fun when you’re competing against no one, but it’s certainly more interesting and more water cooler talk when there’s competition,” Heyman said. “Why is it more interesting? Because there’s more discussion to have, more debates. There’s more different opinions that people can relate to. So the conversations now amongst fans is far more vibrant because there are different cultures now that are colliding.”
Asked if he watches “the competition,” Heyman said he watches everything, even content that might not be considered as competition to WWE. Heyman said that part of the job is looking for anything that can be relevant so that you have a good understanding of what works and what doesn’t, as well as to see if it can help your group or not.
“I watch all of the competition. I watch things that most people wouldn’t even consider competition. If Buenos Aries Championship Wrestling had a pay-per-view on, probably on a Thursday night at 3 a.m.—which by the way, wasn’t a bad timeslot for ECW years ago—I don’t know if I would sit and watch the entire show,” Heyman said, “but I certainly would study it enough to gain knowledge of what’s working, why’s it working and what resonates with the audience enough that there’s a connection that can turn into box office for us or just fascinating watching it be box office for them.
“Part of what I do is to understand the marketplace and if you’re not watching all of the offerings that are out there, including and especially the ones that no one else is seeing yet, then you’re ignorant to the true marketplace. And what’s potentially going to come up in the next five to ten years, let alone five to ten months,” Heyman added, “maybe even five to ten weeks or five to ten days, is something that all of the sudden, becomes relevant.”
Paul Heyman was asked what he thinks about AEW and the product itself, and he said that it doesn’t matter either way. He did call the company a viable entity and it’s good that they are in the wrestling space, but he’s not their audience.
“My personal opinion on their product [doesn’t matter]. If I were to sit here and go, ‘My God, they’re great!’ Who care what I think. That’s just a personal opinion. They’re not geared towards me. And if I sat there and went, ‘Oh my God, they suck, they’re horrible,’ I don’t think they should care about that either. It’s like when Dana White gave his opinion of WWE and it wasn’t flattering, and I was asked about, my answer was ‘And?!? Who gives a f-ck?’
“I don’t think AEW should give a f-ck what I think about them. They should care what the fans think, what their audience thinks and what their potential audience thinks about them. [The thought should be] ‘Here’s who we have, we need to superserve them. We need to make them continue to be loyal to us and we need to expand that base. We need to take that person and lure them in, we need to find people that love WWE and lure them to our tribe. And we need to find people that have never seen sports entertainment/pro wrestling/combat sports, et cetera, et cetera… and lure them onto our show for whatever reason we can justify them coming to pay to see our product.’ That should be their mission. What Paul Heyman thinks of them should be of no concern to them.”
If you use this transcript, credit WrestleZone and link back to this post.
