AEW Backstage Incident Over New Partnership Revealed

AEW

An update has emerged on AEW’s relationships with Mexican promotions AAA and CMLL, with terms of deals with AEW revealed.

UPDATE: Fightful Select has released a report citing AEW sources claiming the below report from the Wrestling Observer Newsletter is “outright false” – read more here.

While AEW has had a working relationship with AAA since the company’s inception in 2019, Tony Khan announced a partnership with CMLL in October 2023, following Mistico’s AEW debut.

With CMLL and AAA historically not working together, details have emerged on part of CMLL’s deal with AEW.

Per Dave Meltzer in the latest edition of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, no other Mexican wrestlers can appear on AEW shows featuring CMLL talent.

Noting that some wrestlers have issues with Tony Khan honoring this agreement, Meltzer wrote:

As noted before, the deal with CMLL is that on any television show that their talent appears on, no other Mexican wrestlers can appear. It doesn’t matter if they work for AAA or not, or did in the past, it’s no other Mexican wrestlers can appear.

Some of the prior Mexican talent is mad that Tony Khan agreed to those terms, noting that AAA never made a demand like that for AEW to not feature CMLL talent even though they were warring in Mexico.

We do know at the start that Tony Khan’s vision was to work with everyone and in the early days CMLL didn’t allow its talent to go there because they were working with AAA and New Japan didn’t work with them under Harold Meij.

It was noted that Penta and Fenix were in AEW from day one in particular and the feeling it’s disrespectful to them that there would be shows including perhaps multiple PPVs this year, including any PPV anyone from CMLL is booked on, that they couldn’t even be allowed on the show. Previously it was just Forbidden Door.

There was an incident with Penta coming off the Jericho Cruise where he stayed for Dynamite as he was under the belief he was booked on, and was there, only to find out that he couldn’t appear on the show because they had booked CMLL guys for both Dynamite and Rampage.

Another backstage update revealed that stars are frustrated with Tony Khan for other reasons too, which you can read more about right here.

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• partnership
• CMLL
• mexico
• AEW

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