WWE and AEW were both offered the chance to purchase Ring of Honor, but it was AEW President Tony Khan who did what was necessary to secure the deal.
Khan has been hyping an industry-changing announcement and delivered the news at the start of this week’s AEW Dynamite. The purchase includes the complete ROH video library, as well as the brand’s assets and intellectual property.
Tony Khan now has the ability to shop around both the AEW and ROH libraries to a streaming service, which could land him (and AEW) a huge influx of revenue in the years ahead. It also gives AEW a secondary brand where they can send young and underutilized talent (think NXT to WWE).
Dave Meltzer addressed Tony Khan’s purchase of ROH on Wrestling Observer Radio. According to Meltzer, both WWE and AEW were contacted about buying the company.
“Both WWE and AEW were contacted when the idea was to sell the company and AEW was the one that, obviously, made the better offer of the two and got the company,” said Meltzer.
Valuable Tape Library
Khan now owns 20 years of footage from ROH, including tapes featuring CM Punk, Bryan Danielson, The Young Bucks, Kenny Omega and many more.
“The tape library is very valuable to AEW because they want to do some sort of a streaming service,” Meltzer continued. “Whether they sell something to HBO Max or they do their own streaming service in some form. That amount of library with a lot of wrestlers, including, one of the keys to that library is Ring of Honor owned the All In show which is an important part of the history of AEW.”
WWE’s Interest in Buying ROH
This is not the first time that WWE considered purchasing Ring of Honor. A few years ago, around 2018, Triple H (Paul Levesque) wanted to buy Ring of Honor for the same reasons that Tony Khan ultimately did. There were talks and WWE made a pitch, but the deal fell apart.
“From what I gather, Vince wanted to buy somebody bigger, not realizing that the ‘bigger’ which was New Japan Pro Wrestling, he couldn’t buy,” Meltzer added. “WWE tried to buy New Japan. They tried to buy Stardom. They tried to buy NOAH. They tried to buy AAA. Nobody would sell to them from foreign countries for the price that they were willing to pay, so none of these deals ever got going, but this is one, obviously, that was in play, and you know, whatever.”
Ring of Honor’s most recent show was December’s ROH Final Battle 2022 pay-per-view. The company ‘went dark’ after that to restructure and evaluate the company’s future operations. In recent weeks, ROH has announced the inductees for the company’s inaugural Hall of Fame Class, including The Briscoe Brothers, CM Punk, Bryan Danielson and Samoa Joe.
The next ROH show, Supercard of Honor XV, is scheduled to take place during WrestleMania 38 weekend in the Dallas, TX metro area. More information on that show below:
