>>16353707Tony doesn't understand how to book wrestling.
This is the thing that everyone dances around. There are incidents that people discuss in isolation but we don't put it together. We presume that a man who has had the success of Tony in AEW can book. The man who filled Wembley and was drawing a million fans a week on TV SURELY can book wrestling right?
No.
AEWs early success was riding on a wave of desire for something new. They had exciting performers who had never been on major Western TV. All In at Wembley was this on a global scale - the British are huge wrestling fans and starved of live wrestling as evidenced by the fact that All In sold 60,000 tickets before a card was announced.
The reality is that AEW has been on a downward trend because that initial enthusiasm has ran out now so it must survive on the booking of Tony. And being a wrestling nerd who watches a lot of shoot interviews doesn't qualify you to become what is essentially the Head Writer of a major TV show.
The footage was used because Tony doesn't understand long term booking and instead wanted to draw a big rating. He thought they could spin this into compelling TV but forgetting all of the drama of the footage and the reaction to it, as a story beat in the Bucks angle it didn't resonate and it didn't make sense. And that's more important, especially if there are innate downsides to it, the upside has to be huge.
Tony's big booking issue imo is that he's driven by pops. Theres a story that was told about Jim Herd, who said that Herd would prefer to employ Sid over Arn Anderson. Sid would do huge gates for a few months but Arn would draw steady money for 20 years and the latter is preferable. Once you've seen the "banger dream matches" then what?
Tony has no financial sense which is why he's still losing money. We know he is because if he wasn't he'd be screaming it. He is not revenue driven because it doesn't matter, he is pop driven. And the footage was a pop. It's that simple
