Chris Jericho says AEW has never spent a moment worrying about WWE, and that the company has never tried to be a smaller version of it.
Jericho was asked by Shakiel Mahjouri what the opportunity is for AEW at a point when the perception of WWE is shifting. His answer was that the question has never applied.
“I think it’s the same as always in that we’ve never worried about WWE. Ever. We’ve only worried about our own show, our own product, the quality of what we’re doing.”
He rejected the framing that AEW’s current position is a matter of perception, arguing the evidence is already on paper.
“And it’s not a perceived upswing. You can see in the numbers, the tickets sold, the ratings. And I think all of that is just because no matter what’s going on around us, we keep our noses to the grindstone and worry about what we’re doing. And what kind of matches and quality and variety.”
“We’ve never been a WWE-lite. We’ve been AEW since day one, and that’s never changed. Sometimes you like it, and sometimes you don’t, but we’ve never changed it.”
Jericho did not criticize WWE at any point in the answer, and did not reference the releases and cost-cutting that have run through the company this year.
The remarks carry some weight given where he was six months ago. Jericho was off AEW television for almost a year from April 2025, a stretch in which he was widely reported to be heading back to WWE, which was interested in bringing him in for a retirement run. He was expected at the Royal Rumble in January and did not appear. His AEW contract had been reported as frozen and then extended.
He returned on the April 1 episode of Dynamite, signed a new multi-year deal in a segment the following week, and wrestled Ricochet at Dynasty in Vancouver in his first match back. It was his first since losing the ROH World Championship to Bandido at the same event a year earlier.
Jericho was AEW’s first World Champion, having signed at the company’s launch press conference in January 2019 and main evented its first pay-per-view.
AEW runs All In at Wembley Stadium on August 30, followed by All Out, WrestleDream and Full Gear before the end of the year.
