For four consecutive weeks, AEW Dynamite has been the No. 1 show on cable on a Wednesday evening. WWE stars are rapidly leaving the sports entertainment brand to join a wrestling promotion and AEW's roster, all while AEW is starting to create partnerships that have boosted AEW's company value. According to AEW President Tony Khan, none of that would have been possible if WWE didn't open the door through what he hinted were their own mistakes.

Khan made an appearance on the Bloomberg Business of Sports and talked about AEW’s growth, including how they were able to gain a good share of the market when things got going. Saying AEW now has what he believes is the best roster in wrestling, he also believes they are now the market leader in many respects. Khan said it didn't start out that way, but WWE opened the door for a competitor to come in and grow quickly. He noted, "...there were a lot of reasons that I feel that I could come in and compete. There were a lot of great wrestlers that weren’t being featured on television and there are a lot of wrestling fans out there that were looking for an alternative product that weren’t satisfied with what they were getting on those shows."

He then added that some potential internal issues he felt WWE might be having with their own company opened the door even further. "...I saw some formidability frankly in the market leader at the time and it’s opened up a lot of market shares for us, for me to bootstrap a new business and build it up and gain a lot of that market share." he said. He added, "we’re now in a lot of significant business markets, we are the worldwide leader.”

WWE Did This To Themselves

Essentially, what Khan is saying is that WWE being unable to feature their own great stars and cater to an audience that wanted something WWE wasn't offering created a window he felt he could climb through and then open a much larger door. Once he was in, the stars and the audience flooded to AEW and now they've become much more than just a small competitor to Vince McMahon.

Credit to Khan for recognizing an opportunity and then working hard to give fans what they weren't getting from the one company who was arguably running the entire industry.

h/t to Dominic DeAngelo of WrestleZone.com for the quotes