Chris Jericho spoke in detail about his decision to sign with AEW on the latest episode of his podcast, Talk is Jericho.
Specifically, Jericho explained why he made the decision to sign with AEW over WWE.
Here is what he said (h/t to Cageside Seats for the quotes below):
“Tony Khan came in with this offer, that’s you know, the biggest offer I’ve ever been offered in my career. And then you have to stop and think. Ok, if you’re gonna get this offer then you know you’re gonna have some real focus… It’s a little bit hard, because I’ve worked for WWE for 19 years. Love the WWE. But, I put myself into Chris Jericho’s shoes back in 1998 back when I was contemplating leaving WCW and thinking, ‘how much further can I go in WCW under these rules, under these conditions?’ And I realized I probably can’t go much farther… so I put myself in those shoes. Could I walk away from the WWE and go to All Elite Wrestling? A brand new company that doesn’t even own a wrestling ring at this point as far as I know.
And after some introspection, the answer was ‘yes, I can do this’. Because what AEW is doing is they’re showing me respect, and they’re showing me that they have a lot of expectations for me. The cart is on my back and I have to do great work, and I have to go the extra mile to help make this work. In WWE, it doesn’t matter what I do. It’s still gonna be WWE. In AEW, it does matter what I do, and I have to be my best, and I have to really use my 30 years, or my 29 years of experience to help build this company. And that was exciting to me.”
Jericho also says that he gave Vince McMahon a chance to match but a formal offer never came:
“Once again, I still kind of gave WWE the benefit of, ‘hey listen guys, the train is leaving the station – are we gonna work together or not?’ And to their credit, we talked and all the way up to a few days before the rally, but there was never really an offer given. And I understand the reasons why, and I’m not gonna get into those, and I understand Vince’s mindset just as he understands mine.”
On a related note, here are some WWE stars who we think could make the jump to AEW.