The episode of Steve Austin’s Broken Skull Sessions with Chris Jericho is currently streaming on the WWE Network. Early on during the conversation, Jericho explained to Austin his decision to sign with AEW in 2019.
“I never thought that I would really work anywhere outside of WWE in the states, for example, after being there for 19 years or so,” Jericho said on the show.
“When AEW was about to start and Tony Khan had this idea,” Jericho continued. “Now, you’ve been around longer than I have but you hear this all the time, ‘oh, there’s going to be a new promotion, there’s a guy whose got money,” whatever, you hear it all the time. So, when I started talking to him, I started realizing that there was something different here about this opportunity to start a new company.”
Jericho then started talking about AEW and Tony Khan having the things needed to be successful with a new wrestling promotion.
“What you need for that, is you need 3 things: finances and passion, that’s one. You need a television contract, and you need talent. You need about 4-6 guys you can build a territory around. Talking to Tony, he had the finances, he had the passion. Then when we started sniffing around, we realized there was a group of guys whose contracts were all coming up at the same time.”
“Cody Rhodes, Kenny Omega, Young Bucks, Chris Jericho, Hangman Page, guess what? There’s your six guys right there, you can start a company on that. 6 legit guys you can build around and Jericho’s got the name value. These other guys, Cody to an extent, but nobody had really heard of the Young Bucks in the mainstream, or Kenny, or Hangman. So, when you see these guys, you’re like ‘where have these guys been?”
“All 3 of those factors all came together in a perfect storm to where we’re like we have a chance to really do something here. The contract with TNT was big because I think at first we were thinking maybe Showtime, or HBO, or Netflix, all these different ideas. But you have to have network TV to get off the ground and TNT provided that.”
The full episode is streaming on the WWE Network now.
