Posted in: AEW, Sports, TV | Tagged: aew, all out, tony khan, wrestling

Tony Khan Explains How AEW Can Bring Live Fans into All Out

When the pandemic hit earlier this year, it changed the landscape of professional wrestling. Live events were canceled, and fans barred from arenas, taking away one of the sport's most important components. Things have bounced back in different ways. For WWE, that means installing a thousand televisions in the stands, calling it the Thunderdome, and livestreaming Raw and Smackdown like a massive weekly Zoom meeting. But for AEW, it means letting fans back in their outdoor arena home, Daily's Place. On a media conference call ahead of Saturday's All Out PPV, Tony Khan talked about where AEW has been and how they got to where they are now.

"We shut the company down in April until we could come up with a way to make it safe to do shows for the wrestlers again," Khan explained. "So we did that. And my number one priority, A and B, are wrestler health and safety and fan health and safety. So we came in, and it's like first to do a wrestling show, we need to make sure we can do this and keep the wrestlers and the crew and staff safe. So we implemented a testing plan, and we returned at the beginning of May with a live show and have been doing this with, you know, testing and have had great results, which really shows that the people have been doing the right things with social distancing because we've had I think, you know, people have come in, we've had very, very few positive cases and we do rigorous testing."

That was the first step, and AEW immediately began looking into how to bring back the fans. "Once we got that implemented, I started to look at how we could utilize our outdoor space to safely have some kind of live event experience," said Khan. "And we'd been putting tested people, you know, fans at ringside, but they weren't really fans. They were wrestlers and crew and staff. But it added a sense of normalcy. You probably heard me say it by now that I got this idea from watching The Tonight Show, and they had the crew in the studio. And going back during the first week of a pandemic, looking at how shows were handling it, that was the most creative thing I'd seen. And then, how can I kind of take that and replicate it? How can we do this?"

For AEW, the unique position of broadcasting from an outdoor arena owned by the Khan family offers a unique opportunity.

"Well, Daily's Place has three levels and is a really big outdoor space," said Khan. "Eventually, we had the staff kind of spaced out in the bowl. And I started to wonder about the top two bowls. There's not a bad seat in the house as far as the stuff we've allocated. I mean, you know, there's great views. My first thought was, is it for egress, for getting people into the building, temperature testing, all the things you need to do, the things I never thought of that our marketing staff put together. Like the pickup of, when people have ordered items online for Shop AEW, they're able to pick them up, which I never even thought of how we'd get through that, or the concession lines, and the creative thought and ingenuity that our team put into it."

From there, it was just a matter of figuring out the details before AEW could have the fans back, at least in some capacity.

"We spent the last several months working on it, and then we did kind of a soft open," Khan explained. "We invited some staff and some sponsors and local friends to come and sit up there and did temperature tests. All the stuff we're doing now for them is kind of a soft open. We slowly started to hire more security personnel. Then, a week before we went live with fans, we had done, again, kind of a soft open. We brought in some security. And I think you saw some of those videos, maybe some of you guys had posted online of what we were doing before we actually started selling tickets just to kind of get ready to train the security personnel to remind people to stay in their pods and keep their masks on or, you know, not too many people going into the bathrooms at once. And it's been a process that, you know, it felt slow because everyone was anxious to have the fans back. But I think it was right to be cautious. And now we've got a process that has worked really well, we think. And hopefully, for all out, it'll pay off with this great crowd of, you know, 700 people, 750 people. However it comes out, exactly, it's going to be the hottest, biggest crowd for wrestling in a long time. And the most important thing is that there'll be a safe crowd."

AEW All Out will air on PPV this Saturday and can be watched on B/R Live or Fite, depending on where you or your VPN reside. Tickets to the live event, unfortunately, are sold out.

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