Chris Jericho does not think AEW should be built around him and says the point of a wrestling company is to develop the people who will replace him.
Speaking on The Wrestling Classic, Jericho was asked about his role after nearly seven years with the company he helped launch.
“You’re part of the foundation. You’re an MVP to the brand, but there’s an uprising of all these new stars, like Kevin Knight, the Will Ospreays, guys that are moving up to the next level.”
“Yeah, that’s how the business works. That’s the way it should work, is you build stars that can take over for the next generation.”
He was direct about where that leaves him.
“You know, the show doesn’t need to be built and shouldn’t be built around Chris Jericho at this point.”
He does think the appearances still land, partly because of how long he has been doing it.
“But I think anything that I do has some merit and people enjoy watching, because it’s been such a long time and we don’t know how much longer it’s going to be. So I think people are enjoying it more this round as well.”
Both names he picked out are on the All In card. Knight has held the TNT Championship since Dynasty on April 12, when he won a Casino Gauntlet for the vacant title after Kyle Fletcher relinquished it through injury, and has made more successful defenses than any champion in the title’s history. One of them was against Jericho on the August 12 Dynamite from the Pearl Theater in Las Vegas. Knight defends against Darby Allin in a Falls Count Anywhere match at Wembley on Sunday.
Ospreay challenges Kenny Omega for the AEW World Championship in the main event of the same show. Omega took that title from MJF at the Beach Break Dynamite on July 8.
Jericho’s other point was about how AEW books its cards, which he thinks gives him matches he could not get elsewhere.
“It’s fun to work with people that I’ve never worked with before. There’s a lot of great young guys on our roster. And there’s a lot of guys I could have great matches with that I’ve worked with before in AEW. We don’t do a lot of repeat matches. That’s the thing.”
His own record bears it out.
“I mean, I worked with Will Ospreay once. I worked with Kenny Omega once, maybe twice in AEW.”
Jericho and Ospreay met at All In in 2023, at the same venue AEW returns to this weekend, in a match Ospreay won. Jericho and Omega worked the main event of Double or Nothing in 2019, AEW’s first pay-per-view, which Jericho won on his way to becoming the company’s first World Champion.
Jericho returned to AEW television in April after nearly a year away, during which he was widely reported to be heading to WWE. He signed a new multi-year deal in the segment the following week and has been working as Painmaker Chris Jericho since, beating Tommaso Ciampa in a no-holds-barred match at Redemption in Montreal in July.
He has been vocal recently about where the company stands. Jericho said this month that AEW has never worried about WWE or been WWE-lite, and argued that its ratings are now higher than they were three or four years ago, once streaming is accounted for.
Eric Bischoff took issue with that on 83 Weeks, pointing out that Jericho had predicted AEW would overtake WWE within six months of its launch and arguing that the company has defined itself against WWE since 2019.
Jericho is 55 and has said that what he took most seriously when AEW started was building other people, after realizing he had roughly three months as the face of the company before the novelty wore off.
“Chris Jericho is the champion, Chris Jericho is the face of the company, and I’ve got about three months of shelf time before that gets old,” he said earlier this month. “So we better build as many stars as we can.”
All In takes place at Wembley Stadium on August 30.
