WWE rival AEW announces its first mega-show in the US – it will be the biggest non-WWE card in over 25 years. More big news on the horizon
The wrestling empire WWE is currently enjoying its biggest boom in decades – but with this news, competitor All Elite Wrestling is also underlining its growing ambitions.
AEW announced on Thursday that it will host a mega-show in a major stadium in the USA for the first time on July 12 of next year: The annual highlight All In – held this year and last year at London’s Wembley Stadium – is moving to Texas in 2025: to Globe Life Field in Arlington, the arena of MLB’s Texas Rangers, which holds just over 40,000 fans.
First AEW Pay-Per-ViewToEver Be Held In Texas 2025@GlobeLifeField
in Arlington, TXToHostAEW:All InTexas AEW AEWAllInTexashttps://t. co/sQTfSHvnq8 pic.twitter.com/5nrWxHXtXG– All Elite Wrestling (@AEW) August 15, 2024
The historic significance of the announcement: This is the first time in over 25 years that a league other than WWE has put on a show this big in North America. The last event on a similar scale was the 1998 special edition of WCW Monday Nitro at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta, where Bill Goldberg took the WCW World Title from Hulk Hogan.
League boss Tony Khan, son of billionaire and sports mogul Shahid Khan (owner of the Jacksonville Jaguars and Fulham FC), is thus sending out a signal of his continued high ambitions to establish AEW as the second force in the US wrestling market in the long term. And he has just announced that further major announcements will follow, saying that AEW is “in the most important phase of its history.”
AEW is likely to announce a landmark deal soon
The general assessment of what lies behind the full-bodied words: negotiations on AEW’s next big TV and streaming deal with media partner Warner Brothers Discovery are declared to be in the home straight.
The impending contract is groundbreaking, as it should make AEW profitable and less dependent on the Khan family’s wealth. The volume of the deal will be a key factor in determining how competitive AEW will be in the coming years.
WWE will earn around 4 billion dollars over the next five years through its TV and streaming contracts with Netflix and the US broadcaster USA Network. AEW is said to have earned just over 200 million dollars with its TV rights in recent years.
Achieving the scale of WWE is illusory, but Khan had the declared goal of also concluding a billion-dollar deal with Warner. How close he can get to this has been the subject of much speculation in recent months and years. Some time ago, Khan described rumors that the new deal was no bigger than the old one as a fabrication of the “WWE PR department.”
Another mega-show rumored to be in the works
While it remains unclear how much TV money Khan can actually plan on, the unveiling of “All In: Texas” shows that the stakes remain high. There have also been recent reports that AEW is “well advanced plans” for a stadium show in Australia next year. Khan has also already announced that All In will return to London in 2026.
Rumors of plans for the now official show in Texas have also been around for some time, despite a preliminary denial from Khan, they were fueled by an already ongoing cooperation with the city of Arlington, where the AEW show Collision and its sister league ROH are currently hosting for an extended period of time.
Texas is a traditional wrestling stronghold: WWE staged several of its biggest WrestleMania shows there, and before that wrestling in Texas was hugely popular thanks to the legendary and tragic Von Erich family’s World Class Championship Wrestling league.
AEW has also recently seen Ross and Marshall Von Erich, sons of the last surviving Von Erich brother Kevin, take on a longer-term role at AEW. Along with Dustin Rhodes – the older brother of WWE Champion Cody Rhodes – they currently form a trio of legendary sons in ROH, holding ROH’s six-man tag team titles.
The latest edition of All In, featuring the World Title match between champion Swerve Strickland and Bryan Danielson, takes place the Sunday after next
