AEW Champion Swerve Strickland Contrasts Promotion With WWE

AEW World Champion Swerve Strickland is a man who has seen what it takes to put together both an All Elite Wrestling event, and a WWE event, and it's safe to say that he has seen some major differences when it comes to comparing both companies. During a recent appearance on the "Bootleg Kev" podcast, Strickland admitted that AEW President Tony Khan is a man who enjoys seeing good wrestling and has modeled his company around putting the focus on the in-ring action, something that Strickland feels WWE lacked when AEW was originally formed. Due to this, Strickland feels it's a simple case of sports entertainment versus professional wrestling. 

"[WWE] have always had great talent, it was just the product was primarily something...they wanted to present something that was sports entertainment," Strickland said. "That's what they built their bread and butter from, that's what they do, and nobody does it better than them. We wanted to build our narrative, our alternative, to what's unique to us and what we the fan base was missing at the time, and what the industry needed." Strickland explained that AEW needed to be a place where fans could see something different, and wrestlers, particularly those in WWE, could come do deliver the type of wrestling that they wanted to do, rather than the type of wrestling WWE wanted to present. 

"We've seen [Jon] Moxley come over...showing his rejuvenation in the wrestling. Bryan Danielson? Rejuvenated. Adam Cole? Rejuvenated. Myself, rejuvenated, and letting the creators and the artists create."

Strickland also highlighted his AEW Double or Nothing opponent Christian Cage as another star who has been transformed in AEW, citing Cage's sometimes volatile material as an example of how Tony Khan gets a kick out of pushing boundaries and seeing how much his performers can do and get away with.

Please credit "Bootleg Kev" when using quotes from this article, and give a H/T to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription.