Mansoor Says MxM Collection Won Over Tony Khan After Signing with AEW

In an interview with Talk is Jericho (via Fightful), Mansoor spoke about how MxM Collection were able to win over Tony Khan before they eventually signed contracts with AEW. The team joined the company in July 2024.

Mason Madden said on MxM Collection: “We thought for sure, we were like, ‘Well, the only other place we can make money in this business is AEW, let’s switch it up. Let’s be something we think AEW would like.’ We got new gear made, we wanted to stick together because we felt like that was our appeal, our chemistry and the fact that we were the only tag team that stuck together post-release in that class. We were like, ‘Yeah, let’s stick together but let’s be a little bit more of ourselves.’ We’ll kind of tone it down, way down.”

Mansoor added: “I think the intention was to prove to the audience that watches independent promotions that we can go. I think there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that we could portray larger than life characters or cut promos, but as far as bell-to-bell, what can these guys do?”

Madden continued: “We had never had a match on TV longer than four minutes [laughs]. We definitely outpaced our WWE match time in like a month in AEW.”

Mansoor said: “Honestly, we won over Tony because he didn’t know that we could wrestle. He had no clue. I think he brought us in as these guys, well, there’s a million great wrestlers in AEW, there’s no shortage of the best wrestlers, we have the best wrestlers in the world. But what can these guys do in terms of entertainment and you know, bringing the live crowd on their feet with something crazy and something different. But the fact that we were able to marry the two in our first couple of matches — I mean our first match on AEW television was FTR. To Tony’s testament, what a genius move, what a contrast of styles. No other team could have made us look as real to ourselves as possible as FTR. In that match, they were so serious and down to earth wrestlers. I was jumping into his arms like Scooby-Doo. Once we had that match and got the ball rolling, we were getting trusted to have these two segment matches where it was going at a pace where the crowds were really getting into it, as well as entertaining people with our antics, we were off to the races.”