Eric Bischoff Warns AEW Of The Dangers Of Too Many Ex-WWE Stars
Former WCW President Eric Bischoff has commented on the issues he foresees if AEW signs too many talents that used to compete in WWE.
As President of World Championship Wrestling in the nineties, Bischoff oversaw an aggressive recruitment campaign that saw stars such as Lex Luger, Randy Savage, Kevin Nash, and Scott Hall all make the jump from the WWF to Atlanta.
Speaking on his 83 Weeks podcast, Eric Bischoff has warned AEW of potential issues facing them if they continue with big-name talents coming into the company in a short space of time:
“This is not a criticism, this is an observation. In the last couple of months, you’ve got Mark Henry, Christian Cage, Andrade, Big Show. You’ve got all this incredibly valuable talent each in their own way, Sting. Are they as valuable, the influx of all that top talent, is Sting as valuable as a commodity as he would’ve been had there been more focus on Sting? In case [Daniel] Bryan and CM Punk both go to AEW as we’re reading about, that’s an amazingly cool great thing. To have them both come in at the same time, I think they each dilute each other.”
“Here’s the risk, what’s going to happen to a lot of that younger, homegrown talent that AEW started out with that people were so excited about? What was the excitement when AEW became a thing? We’re going to be an alternative to WWE. I still hear that by the way, that’s a great goal, be different than. I like it, but then when you start bringing in so many valuable top talents [from WWE], what happens to your core?”
Bischoff then brought up the fact that the company is limited by only having so much television time each week to give their stars a platform. AEW will add a second show called Rampage to its TNT offering beginning in August.
Eric Bischoff continued:
“There’s only so much television time folks, there’s only so many minutes in an hour. Even if [CM Punk and Daniel] don’t [end up in AEW], there’s still a lot of ex-WWE talent that are very valuable that are going to be taking up TV time from other younger less experienced talent and that’s where the rift starts. When you bring in all of that top talent that has had so much television time on the biggest platform in the world, they’ve obviously got a big fan base.”
“All of a sudden that young aspirational group of talent that’s coming up that people were so excited about, they’re not going to get the focus because there’s only so much television time. This is not going to happen tomorrow or next week or next month but a lot of that talent that people were so excited about that differentiated AEW from WWE and delivered on the promise of being an alternative all of a sudden doesn’t feel like an alternative anymore.”