AEW Confirms ITV UK TV Deal
During the full video of his interview with Jack Whitehall AEW founder and CEO Tony Khan confirmed that AEW will air on ITV in the UK. Whitehall mentioned in the interview, which you can see below, that the company’s TV show would air on the UK network as reported earlier on Thursday. Khan confirmed the news and commented on the deal with ITV.
ITV 4 is a big deal in the UK with availability in almost 27 million homes. By comparison, as as Fightful notes, WWE’s new UK home in BT Sport is in 2.19 million homes. Fightful noted that during the “An Evening With Cody & The Young Bucks” stage show at Starrcast on Thursday, Cody said, “WWE’s TV deal in the UK sucks compared to ours.”
“Yeah, they were the first partner we could have chosen,” Khan said. “The people at ITV are phenomenal. When I first went to them with this idea, I didn’t actually have anything yet. All I had was an idea … I went to them and I had no wrestlers or you know, really didn’t even officially have a name of a wrestling company, I had an idea. They didn’t buy it, but they liked what I was saying. I hadn’t sold anything to them yet but we had a concept that they wanted to keep talking about. And when I did do all these things, they knew, ‘Hey, it’s a man of his word. He said he was gonna create a new wrestling company, he said he’d generate a lot of interest in the wrestling company, he said they were gonna put together a roster of the best performers in the world in a short time, and build this buzz. And that they would do this show in Las Vegas and it would sell out.’ And I went and did all those things, and then you know, they were there and they held up their end of the handshake too.”
He continued, “And it’s been a great partnership, and the people that work at ITV Sport are like, phenomenal, phenomenal people. What I think is really cool is some of them are like, really, really big wrestling fans. It’s always a pleasure. Just like I enjoy talking to you about it and enjoy getting you back into wrestling, I enjoy talking to them about it. It’s really fun, it’s not a chore for me. This is like when you say, ‘Am I mad to get into this business?’ Well, I told you when I was getting into it, I really do love it. Just like with all the businesses we get in, I’m very fortunate that I get to work in things I like, and want to do, and that I choose to do. I’m not doing this just because it’s a fun thing to do. We’ve invested millions upon millions of dollars into what we really believe is going to be a huge, huge business.”
Talking about the possibility of touring in the UK, Khan said, “I would love to bring AEW to the UK in the future. I mean, we’ve — what we’ve got right now in the U.S. and the U.K. is phenomenal. Because like I said, it’s been so long since anybody’s had the distribution – nobody’s had the distribution we have. To have partnerships with both TNT and ITV at the same time, it’s the best distribution any wrestling company, bar none, has ever had. And that’s what we have on our side right now. And absolutely we are going to come to the U.K. and do some big shows. I’m really excited about what we’re going to do there.”Click Here: Sao Paulo soccer tracksuit