Tony Khan discusses AEW's ongoing media rights negotiations. Screen grab: AEW

All Elite Wrestling has seen its fair share of struggles recently and the latest comments from AEW president Tony Khan makes you wonder whether or not he is living in a world of reality or kayfabe.

All Elite Wrestling has been signed to WBD since the company’s founding as a major wrestling promotion and their debut on cable in 2019 through their flagship program AEW Dynamite. AEW’s success even saw them sign a second media rights deal with the media company that has secured their long-term future.

But ratings have continued to slide over the last year or more thanks to a number of factors. Those include questionable or sometimes non-existent storytelling, top stars departing like CM Punk in controversial circumstances, an ROH acquisition and quasi-merger that has never made sense, oversized rosters with inconsistent use, and a much stronger WWE product.

But if you listen to Tony Khan, AEW has never been healthier. In fact, in an interview with Yahoo! Finance, Khan said that their cable viewership numbers are growing when in fact the opposite is true.

“We’re doing fantastic. This is a huge year for us. We grew the business so much with the simulcast, we’ve brought in new audience with Max and streaming but also we’ve been able to grow our cable audience year-over-year,” Khan said.

When confronted with skepticism over growing his cable audience for AEW, Tony Khan doubled down.

“A lot of people thought when you start simulcasting AEW on Wednesday nights and Saturday nights, oh ok a lot of people they’re still going to watch the show but people are going to migrate to streaming. Well actually our cable audience when we started simulcasting went up and we have a great audience on Max streaming every week too. So we have been able to do that and we’ve really maintained and grown a great audience over the years. AEW, we say it’s where the best wrestle and I really believe that’s true,” Khan added.

Tony Khan can say the company is growing in cable viewership but it is just not true.

The Wrestlenomics website tracks weekly television ratings in the wrestling industry. And as you can clearly see from these charts posted on the website, AEW has actually seen precipitous ratings declines so far in 2025 compared to 2024. In fact, AEW Dynamite was down a whopping 24% in audience in Q1 this year.

Credit: Wrestlenomics

The raw numbers show that AEW is down 44% from their peak back in 2021 for Dynamite. That makes it really hard to sell that your company is doing better than it ever has, especially since low attendance has caused AEW to now run theaters and ballrooms for their weekly shows instead of larger arenas.

Maybe you can see what Khan is trying to sell when looking at this chart though. AEW is up a slight amount so far this year compared to 2024 Q4, but that’s not how anybody measures “year-over-year” growth by picking and choosing what quarters you want to compare.

Credit: Wrestlenomics

There’s also great mystery over what exactly AEW is drawing on Max as neither the company nor the streamer has released any real audience numbers. But given other viewing trends, at least in the sports world, it would be hard to fathom the Max audience coming anywhere close to what AEW draws on cable.

The professional wrestling world is certainly much better off with a healthy and vibrant AEW. And yes, wrestling promoters have a long and extensive history of playing loose with the facts and doing whatever they can to get their product over. But Tony Khan isn’t doing his company or the industry any favors by refusing to accept the real truth about where AEW is at the moment.