Chris Jericho believes AEW shows moving to smaller venues in 2025 will help the company’s growth and make the product hot again.
After spending most of 2024 battling with low ticket sales, Tony Khan hinted that they’ll be changing their strategy for 2025. During the Full Gear media scrum last month, the AEW president had said that he wanted to find markets and buildings ‘where it’s going to be packed and red hot.’
Chris Jericho was asked about Khan’s comments during a recent interview with Z100 New York. The current ROH World Champion was there to promote ROH’s Final Battle PPV from Hammerstein Ballroom and he explained that smaller venues that are packed with fans can change the entire vibe of the shows:
“I think the worst thing you could ever do is to kind of in any business overprice yourself or overextend yourself. We’re at a place where to go to some of the middle-size venues not in every city but in some of them, it’s a very smart move.
For many reasons but most importantly just the vibe of the fans. Like you want to put 10,000 people into an arena and if you can, you do. If you’re down to 5,000 but you go to a 4,000-seat arena, it increases demand.”
It Just Makes The Product Hotter: Chris Jericho
The wrestling veteran discussed how AEW has been the ‘cool promotion’ for the majority of its existence. Per Chris Jericho, creating demand with smaller venues can help them regain some of their lost charm:
“It just makes the show that much more exciting and it translates so much better on TV. So I think right now with all of the different choices that people have to buy tickets to go to shows, I think we’re smart to moving to some of these like you mentioned different sized venues.
Because it just makes it cooler and we have always had the cool factor in AEW, especially when we started and then going into the pandemic, coming out of the pandemic. I think one way is the supply and demand. If you have this many tickets for sale and they’re gone. It just makes the product hotter and you can just continue to grow.”
Chris Jericho successfully defended the ROH Championship against Matt Cardona at Final Battle but he was confronted by a returning star afterward. You can check out more about it here.