Eric Bischoff Discusses The Scheduling Of AEW All In & AEW All Out
On the most recent episode of ‘Strictly Business’, Eric Bischoff discussed AEW All In, set to emanate from Wembley Stadium in London, England. The show, AEW’s first outside North America, is by far the biggest in the company’s history in terms of attendance. 75,000 tickets have already been sold with no matches announced yet.
However, as is Labour Day tradition, AEW All Out will emanate from Chicago, Illinois, the following week, and on top of that, from the United Center. Having is say on the matter, Eric Bischoff suggested that while it would be logistically tough to hold both events back-to-back, as far as pay-per-view attendance and buys are concerned, AEW All In will complement All Out, if anything. He said,
“No, that would be, that, that would be, that wouldn’t be smart. I mean, it’s hard, and that’s gonna be physically, logistically difficult. But Wembley is gonna get so much buzz. There’s gonna be so many people talking about it. We’re gonna see a lot of videos from it. We’re gonna see a lot of social media traffic for it. All of that elevates the AEW brand. And it certainly can’t hurt the pay-per-view coming up and most likely would help it. I would think it’s common sense. If you get people excited about your product, you’ve been able to showcase it in front of 70 or 75,000 people; there’s a great buzz about it. Hopefully, there’ll be a great buzz about it. There should be, unless it’s just, it’s a catastrophe inside of the ring, and I don’t see that happening. So, you’ve got a great buzz. You’ve got a showcase event. You’ve got 70, 75,000 people. Um, damn. How could that hurt your pay-per-view? If anything, you would think that you would drag some of that audience who might not otherwise buy a new pay-per-view. Maybe they’re not quite convinced yet; they will be after this event. So no, I think it’s a net positive.”
The current set-up at Wembley Stadium is expected to have a capacity of around 90,000 fans, and Bischoff also shared his opinion on whether AEW will be able to sell out the show. He said,
“I don’t know. Well, they still have time, right? 20,000 tickets. Although the trajectory for ticket sales it’s taken ’em a while. I mean, they went from zero to 60,000 in what seems like about five minutes. It wasn’t five minutes, but it seemed like it, they went very, very fast, and then it kind of stopped and hovered around 63, 65,000 for quite a while, and now it’s back up again, uh, incrementally compared to the initial sales for the first ten days. You could argue that that’s one of the reasons that they have the successor haven’t because they, you know, Europe hasn’t seen Moxley and Chris Jericho and you know, Miro, and look at the abundance of names on that roster that Europe hasn’t seen now in 5, 6, 7 years. I don’t know. We’ll see. You know, they’re still only delivering 55,000, 75,000 viewers per week. So that would suggest that every single viewer that watches AEW bought a ticket. I don’t think so. I think there’s a percentage of those people that bought tickets, but I think a large percentage of that audience is coming to see talent that they fell in love with in and they haven’t seen in five or six years. And you know, how you’ll know when I’m right or when I’m wrong is when they go back next year.”
Notably, the attendance for WWE SummerSlam 1992 at the old Wembley Stadium was 80,355 people, with AEW All In already on the threshold. All In has the potential to rank among the most attended single-night events in professional history.
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