Chris Jericho Reacts To Vince McMahon Saying AEW Isn’t Competition For WWE

In 2019 the Wednesday Night Wars kicked off when AEW started going head to head with NXT, but NXT has since moved to Tuesday nights. Ever since the inception of All Elite Wrestling there’s been a lot of talk about whether or not the company could become competition for WWE someday, but Vince McMahon doesn’t seem to think so.

During WWE’s recent Q2 earnings call Vince McMahon was asked about AEW making investments in their roster, and if he feels WWE will have to counter their investments. McMahon noted that he doesn’t know what AEW’s plans are but he doesn’t see the company as competition.

“It’s certainly not a situation where it’s rising tides because Ted Turner was coming after us with all of Time Warner assets as well. It was a different situation. AEW is where they are. I don’t really know what their plans are, all I know is what our plans are. I don’t consider them competition in the way that I considered WCW back in the day. Not even near close to that. I’m not so sure what their investments are as far as their talent is concerned. Perhaps, we can give them some more.”

During a recent interview with Inside The Ropes the first ever AEW World Champion Chris Jericho reacted to McMahon’s comments, and he noted that he thinks the Chairman of the Board was smart to handle it the way he did.

“Well, what else is he going to say? You know, and to respond to that, we don’t see WWE as competition. And he was smart to say that.”

Chris Jericho also went on to say that the Wednesday Night Wars were an “abysmal failure” for NXT, and that AEW wasn’t trying to keep up with what NXT was doing.

“We’re not worried about what WWE is and we haven’t been since day one. We weren’t worried about what NXT did. The whole time with the NXT vs. AEW war, which ended in a total abysmal failure for NXT, we never once had a TV screen watching what they were doing when we were doing it. We didn’t know what segments they were in. We didn’t know any of that. Now, the WWE way is you’re watching what the competition is doing when they were on, we didn’t do that. And it was no disrespect. We just didn’t care. We were too busy worrying about our own company and about our own stories, and about our own show to care what anybody else is doing. And that’s one of the reasons why we did so well is that we were concentrating on AEW, not anything else.”