8 Wrestlers That Visibly Hated Working For AEW
Who didn’t have that AEW “feeling”?
In 2019, AEW was described by Cody Rhodes as the “Ellis Island of professional wrestling”. For a time, it was.
Vince McMahon’s WWE was an oppressive, wildly erratic place. The wrestlers, some of whom were “warehoused” despite asking to leave, were not able to express themselves. Infamously awful ideas were imposed upon them at a staggering frequency. WWE’s creative atrocities were nothing new, but had plummeted to a new, inexplicable nadir. Meanwhile, the same old core problems persisted.
WWE pushed who they wanted to push irrespective of whether they were over, and cared little about pushing wrestlers who had forged a genuine connection with the fans if they didn’t want to push them.
Basically, in that era, WWE created an environment in which a wrestler was almost lucky if they got to perform slop. AEW marketed itself as WWE’s exact antithesis - literally, a utopia in contrast to a dystopia. You’d get to cut your own promos. You’d get to bleed. While the matches were agented, there would be very few constraints on the stories you’d like to tell in the ring. The platform was there for you to become one of the absolute best wrestlers in the world and perform in some of the best matches ever.
Every wrestling promotion undergoes a decline at some point or another; AEW was no different. In fact, by 2024, the inverse was true; Fenix, Ricky Starks, Mariah May and other members of the AEW roster wanted out to realise their dream of performing for WWE.
A lot of things converged to inform this paradigm shift. AEW cooled. AEW was systemically mismanaged for at least two years. WWE has a chokehold over the wrestlers who grew up watching it irrespective of little critical acclaim it may have generated. At some point, AEW, to some, was decidedly not a utopia - and at times, it showed.
There’s a lot of inference here, based on body language, social media posts, and reporting. You can’t tell you who’s truly checked out. But there are clues…