10 Wrestlers Who Transformed Their Careers By Leaving WWE

In a career that parallels his one-time tag team rival Christian, Matt Hardy is half of one of wrestling’s most influential tag teams. However, he was for a long time considered to be the beta to his brother Jeff.

Hardy’s original WWE run came to a swift end due to the real-life infidelity of Matt’s girlfriend Lita and his close friend Edge. Matt’s understandable outburst led to him being fired. Though rehired due to fan pressure, the jilted Hardy came out of the feud a loser in love and stumbled through WWE’s mid-card. However, fans would soon discover Matt had one of the most creative minds ever to work its magic in professional wrestling.

In 2016, during his time at TNA, Hardy invented The Broken Universe. Broken Matt Hardy became one of wrestling’s most compelling character’s, adopting a baroque persona obsessed with deletion. Through his matches at the Hardy Compound, Matt popularised cinematic matches, and managed to get a drone more over than most of the roster.

Though Hardy returned to the WWE with his “Woken” gimmick, he has found a home with AEW, where he is free to explore all his eccentricities and hardcore inclinations.