QT Marshall Responds To Criticism Of AEW's Hiring Practices, Women's Roster

QT Marshall was recently a guest on the WrestleTalk podcast, where he spoke about the criticism that AEW often gets for signing too many stars.

“I think it’s just better for everybody. It creates more matches. I think AEW does a really good job of not putting too many rematches out there unless they mean something. Having more talent just makes it easier to do that. You say about the people complaining [on Twitter], every single person that becomes a free agent, somebody on Twitter posts that ‘you have to sign them.’ The same exact people that complain when we hire people are the ones pushing to get them hired. You can’t read into that stuff. We’re gonna get as many talent out there and give them a chance. If our fans like them, they’re gonna stay. If they don’t like them, we don’t hire everybody just because they’re out on TV once – it doesn’t mean they’re locked into a 10-year contract either. It’s just about seeing how our fans react, and again, the live audience is what matters. It’s not what the people say on Twitter.”

On fans who complain about a lack of women's matches:

“If you look at the ratio of how many guys are on the roster compared to how many girls are on the roster, you want to talk about keeping it even, you have to keep it even. How do you do that? If you have 100-something guys and 20 girls, how do you mathematically do it and make it work? I do think, over time, that will happen, but we really have to stick to the ratio of males to females. Do we get rid of all the male wrestlers and hire a lot more females? Then we have no option but to have more female talent out there, right? It’s just one of those things. We’re doing it, and I know on Rampage we try to get two female matches, a couple weeks ago we had two female matches on Dynamite. It’s hard. There is only so much time on the show.

“For everyone that says ‘you could get more women’s matches,’ I would say, how about all the guys that are backstage not wrestling? How come we don’t use all of them and why do we have to use the same talent? You can’t please everybody. I think over time, maybe it’ll help and maybe we’ll get better at it. That’s not my decision, but at the end of the day, we try to – if you’re not wrestling, we try to get storylines going. We’ve been better at that between Leyla [Hirsch], [Kris] Statlander, The Bunny with Tay [Conti] I just look at pure numbers. Maybe that’s not the right answer, but to me, that’s the logical one. We have this many males, this many females, so if you do the math, that’s kind of how it’s going to work out. Maybe it’s not the most popular answer. You can say male and female, I say wrestler. I just look at wrestlers.”