This past Saturday, I attended WWE Money in the Bank at the Scotiabank Arena in Toronto; a week earlier, I was at the UBS Arena in Long Island watching AEW Forbidden Door.
It is a privilege to be able to attend two major wrestling PPVs (or PLEs, as some might say) within a week of each other, and I was only able to do this after relocating from the UK to Toronto earlier this year.
No matter what either company may want to say on the record, WWE and AEW are in direct competition for wrestling fans’ money and attention and attending marquee events for both companies back-to-back gave me a unique and interesting way to compare and contrast them.
But first, let’s set out some ground rules and state the obvious.
WWE is a billion-dollar company that has decades on AEW when it comes to brand building. They also now have the TKO machine behind them. But while AEW is still a young brand, it has a vast amount of money behind it, thanks to the Khan family, who are richer than WWE’s founding family, The McMahons.
WWE also presented a three-day event at Scotiabank, which began with SmackDown on Friday and ended with NXT Heatwave on Sunday. In the interest of fairness, I will only compare Forbidden Door with Money in the Bank.
Finally, to offer complete transparency, I must state that I did not pay for a ticket to either Forbidden Door or Money in the Bank, as I was granted media access to both. Both AEW and WWE provided me with tickets immediately upon my request, and I had no problems getting access or communicating with either company’s PR representatives.
Now, let’s get down to it.
Firstly, let’s talk about local advertising. I arrived in New York the day before Forbidden Door and saw no advertising for the show there or in Long Island. There were no billboards, and it wasn’t even advertised on the LED boards outside the arena.
Similarly, I didn’t see billboards or anything around Toronto for Money in the Bank. That’s not to say that there weren’t any, but I live a 37-minute walk away from Scotiabank and spend a lot of time in the Downtown area, and I didn’t see anything.
However, WWE may not need to invest in local advertising. From Thursday evening onwards, it was clear they were in town. Going out on Thursday night and walking around Yonge/Dundas, I saw plenty of WWE fans wearing merchandise, and this only increased on Friday ahead of SmackDown. While it wasn’t WrestleMania-level WWE taking over a city, their presence was definitely felt to the trained eye.
For Forbidden Door I was staying in Manhattan so it’s probably unfair to point out that I only saw a handful of AEW T-shirts in New York on Friday and Saturday.
However, the difference was stark when it came to travelling and arriving at each show. To get to Forbidden Door I took the Long Island Rail Road along with many others who were attending the show. From where the train leaves you off, there is about a 10-minute walk to the arena, so everyone on the path was presumably an AEW fan.
Having been to many AEW and WWE live shows over the years, I was struck by how quiet the fans were outside the arena. There was no atmosphere, no sense of excitement or urgency; it was just a lot of people slowly filling into the arena. The excitement level seemed much lower than at Dynasty, the last PPV I attended, or any other AEW show I’ve been to.
In contrast, outside Scotiabank felt like a massive party. The fans were loud, with ‘Yeet’ and ‘Yeah’ being the favoured chants. They all seemed excited and hyped for the show. There was also a band outside playing music and at least two merchandise trucks. This atmosphere is undeniably due to how hot WWE is at the moment and how well they’ve done building their biggest stars.
However, I would add that Scotiabank's downtown location does help. The UBS Arena wasn’t a Hoffman Estates-level nightmare to get to, but it was still very out of the way.
As I’ve mentioned, WWE had merch trucks outside the arena and a Money in the Bank pop-up store close by. But let’s be as fair as possible and discount these and just talk about the merchandise on offer inside the arena.
As someone who has attended more than 20 AEW shows over the past four years, I am constantly baffled by the company’s complete merchandising failure at live events. For example, I am still yet to ever see a T-shirt for Chris Jericho, Jon Moxley, or Bryan Danielson on sale at an AEW event, three wrestlers who every fan in the building knows and three who I hear talked about most while sitting in the crowd.
It seems the company’s policy is now to sell a few poorly designed ‘I was there' event T-shirts and one or two for an individual wrestler. A few months ago, I went to a bar to see one of my favourite bands of all time, Pretty Boy Floyd, and if you’re reading this and can name one of their songs, well done. They had twice the number of T-shirts for sale AEW had, and they played to less than 100 people.
Considering the show was on Long Island, the lack of MJF merchandise was criminal. Everything was also horrendously overpriced. Many fans were wearing AEW merchandise, meaning they bought them online and would probably buy more at the shows.
I saw way more Will Ospreay and United Empire shirts than I had anticipated, which shows how popular he is with this audience, but he had no shirts for sale at the show that I saw.
I can only speculate that AEW has worked out that printing wrestler T-shirts is a loss leader, but I would argue that it’s money worth ‘wasting. ' When you see a large number of fans wearing a wrestler’s T-shirt they seem way more over, that’s something that could really help a Swerve Strickland right now.
In contrast, WWE had everything you could want, even a Cody Rhodes Pharaoh plushie, the only piece of merch I bought over the two shows. There were shirts for all the top wrestlers, along with Toronto-themed Money in the Bank merch. Jey Uso felt incredibly over, thanks to the number of Yeet T-shirts.
American Nightmare stuff was everywhere, and as much as I was baffled when Cody Rhodes first got that tattoo, it makes total sense now the WWE machine is behind his branding. There were also CM Punk shirts, which reminded me of when AEW ran two nights in Chicago, and I was told the Punk shirts weren’t being restocked after selling out on night one.
When it comes to comparing the two as wrestling events, Swerve Strickland vs. Will Ospreay was by far the best match I saw on either show. It was truly a classic. I would also put Orange Cassidy vs. Zack Sabre Jr. as my second favourite match across the two events. However, I enjoyed every single match on Money in the Bank, and I thought they were all important.
Forbidden Door was an absolute marathon, and that was too much for me. I purposely skipped the pre-show and sat in the bar next to the arena because I can spend only so many hours inside one building. AEW presented 15 matches to a crowd who weren’t particularly hot anyway and seemed weary as the night went on, except for during the main event, which felt huge and consequential. My experience was heightened by having the Briscoe family seated behind me and Papa Briscoe loving Orange Cassidy. He was making more noise than the entire building during that match, which showed when I went online and saw that fans watching at home weren’t as high on it as I was.
In my opinion, Forbidden Door as a concept right now seems passé, particularly because AEW now has three of NJPW’s former top stars: Okada, Ospreay, and Jay White.
AEW’s hometown hero, MJF, was in a meaningless opening match with an opponent he did not care about. The Learning Tree and Cobb vs Samoa Joe, Hook, and Shibata match was a great example of the Forbidden Door concept’s failure in 2024. The crowd would have been way more into a Cobb vs Joe singles, which would be close to dream match territory.
Plus, we had Jericho confusingly challenged by Suzuki on Dynamite the week prior and then him attacking Mistico in CMLL days before the show. Still, instead of either singles match, we got a fit-for-Dynamite trios match.
Mercedes vs Vaquer was excellent, as was the ladder match, but the show was full of bathroom break moments. Plus, because of the massive card, nothing was allowed to breathe. Jack Perry won the TNT Championship, and they turned off the lights immediately to set up for the next match without letting him properly celebrate.
Tony Khan may think he’s providing value for money, but it feels more like quantity over quality. Not every fan will agree with that point, but I’d rather be left wanting more than burned out.
On the other end, WWE presented a five-match card, which is too low; six or seven may be the sweet spot, but each match was well built, and I was seated for every one, with no bathroom breaks.
The only negative to the show was that while AEW rushed everything, WWE does do too many video packages and adverts between matches. I particularly didn’t like the lengthy ad for WrestleMania Behind The Curtain; I don’t need to see how the magic trick was done during the intermission.
I would have added a Liv Morgan title defence to the card just to add the drama of whether Tiffany Stratton would cash in that night. But with two ladder matches and a CM Punk appearance, I can’t complain. Plus, the crowd was hot the entire night, with deafening receptions for Jey Uso, LA Knight, and Cody Rhodes.
Finally, I have to give some insight into what it’s like to attend these events as media and address the dreaded post-show scrums/pressers topic.
While I said I’d only be comparing the two PPVs, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that WWE held a media day on Friday at the MLSE LaunchPad in Toronto with LA Knight, Chelsea Green, Tiffany Stratton, and Carmelo Hayes, that I attended. This was great publicity for the company, showing the Superstars with excited children and having them announce a donation.
The press present got to conduct interviews with the Superstars, meaning my social media feed was filled with MITB hype as most major outlets were represented.
In contrast, AEW offered nothing similar and, since I’ve been attending PPVs, has only held junket-style press days for All In in London.
From the point of view of a media member, it is easy to see why some of my peers may show a WWE bias, whether conscious or unconscious—WWE actually makes it worth your while attending PPV weekends.
In the past, I have spent hundreds attending AEW shows. Usually, I get a Zoom interview days before the show, and that’s it. There are no in-person interviews I can try to recoup costs on. The scrum, in my opinion, doesn’t count as content because AEW streams it live (as WWE does with theirs, so I don’t count it either).
I have asked for in-person interviews when I’ve travelled across the Atlantic for AEW and they are not offered by the company. In one instance, I was given a non-video interview that I nearly didn’t get but was told: ‘I’m sure you’ll get quite a bit of content over the next few days with three live shows/media call/scrum’—no, I did not, and none of it would be exclusive anyway.
I didn’t pay for travel to MITB because I’m local, but if I had, I would have been satisfied with the content I got on Friday. It is clear that AEW needs to play the PR game better, take care of the media, and treat them seriously. I have experience in music, film, and TV journalism, and this is a give-and-take game that WWE has mastered while AEW rides on five-star match reviews.
Regarding the scrums/pressers, both companies are unsure what they want them to be. But I’ll start by saying that for the AEW one, you wait around until you’re brought to the room, and in this instance, they were filming a post-show with Renee Paquette and RJ City where the scrum was to be held. This was after midnight when people still had to travel home. In contrast, WWE wastes no time. As soon as the ref hits three in the main event you better be waiting to go to the presser.
AEW has at least now made their scrums shorter, but it is suspicious that Renee only started acting as a host after Tony Khan’s terrible performance when grilled at World’s End.
I do believe that these scrums should be taken seriously, and John Pollock and Brandon Thurston asked both John Cena and Paul Levesque tough questions that they failed to answer satisfactorily. These are two men who, in my opinion, should be asked these questions. I would not agree with, for example, asking Tiffany Stratton about Vince McMahon, but Levesque and Cena have a personal connection to him.
This time, I thought the tone of WWE’s presser was much better than AEW’s. Full disclosure: I walked out of AEW’s scrum because I was genuinely insulted. I understand that everyone in the room is there for different reasons, but to me, there are limits.
My limit was reached after Toni Storm’s appearance. Toni Storm has been in character at every scrum, and it is nothing but a waste of time for the media. Some other wrestlers are in character, yes, but her act is something for a post-show Twitter clip, not a media scrum.
After watching her, Mina, and Mariah dance while Khan sat there at nearly 1 am, I decided to catch my train back to the city. Even if you are a member of the media who believes in softball and fun questions, Storm offers nothing but a waste of our time, and that is no disrespect to her as a performer; she is excellent, and her character work is incredible, but it is not appropriate for this setting.
Khan's sitting next to her makes it worse, and if Levesque sat next to three women dancing for the press, I’d feel the same way.
Khan could decide to only come out when it’s his turn to show the shift in tone, but instead, he sits through it all, something that has already burned him multiple times. In all honesty, I wish I’d stayed to ask Khan the question I had for him. It was really good, and I may not get another chance, but in this instance, after a long show, I was done, and even if no one noticed, I felt better making the point of leaving than sitting through it.
If you made it through this article that has skewed more into Forbidden Door length than Money in the Bank, please understand that these are a series of observations I made while attending both shows in a short period. Both companies have their strengths and weaknesses; neither is perfect, and both can learn from each other.
But we are currently in an interesting time where WWE feels reborn after Vince McMahon left in disgrace, and AEW doesn’t feel like the hot young promotion any more. I have followed AEW from day one, and they have invested millions in talent and have assembled one of the best rosters of all time, but they constantly seem not to want to put the effort and money into other areas of the company.
I have been a WWE fan for around 25 years and have gone through ups and downs with the product. I have experienced working with them as a company, and I can see that they are in one of the hottest periods of my lifetime.
We are living in an era where people are more on their phones than in the real world. Decades ago, people saw The Beatles live and couldn’t even document it with a photo. There are so many little touches that turn going to an event into an experience that you’ll remember forever, whether you’re a fan or a media member, and the most significant difference between these two events was the feeling I left with.
I experienced Money in the Bank, took in the atmosphere, and got more than just enjoyment out of it. I felt I was part of something. I left thinking about WWE as a company like a well-oiled machine, committed to ‘putting smiles on people’s faces’ and doing the work.
In contrast, I watched Forbidden Door for hours, and I left knowing I’d seen one amazing match that will live on in my head forever but as a singular memory of two wrestlers in their prime, utterly detached from the event I attended.
I left thinking that, as a company, AEW seems disorganised, unfocused, and bloated in the wrong areas. And I left in a bad mood which is the worst way someone from the media can leave your event, even if it is just one exasperated woman with a Substack.
What annoys me with AEW is that they put no effort into advertising.
None of their wrestlers or staff go on TV shows here in the UK.
You wouldn't ever know that there was any other wrestling company than WWE.
You have excellent wrestlers who can talk for hours, very well, yet they are not used to promote the company in anyway.
Imagine Jericho or MJF on Jonathon Ross's talk show or Graham Norton's.
Such a misses opportunity.
WWE have had former wrestlers on tge American version of Strictly Come Dancing, why not have someone from AEW on that?
Just put some effort into promoting their show, is thar really so hard??
Right on Steph and this might sound weird as someone who wears glasses, but Tony needs to go back to contacts, he looks like Peter Parker before he became Spider-Man.