Chris Jericho Says AEW Is Better Now Than It Was a Month Ago

Speaking recently on Busted Open, Chris Jericho answered affirmatively when asked if AEW is improved now in comparison to a month ago (via Fightful). Jericho didn’t name-drop a certain former member of the promotion explicitly, however, and went on to detail his thoughts on having the best people in the right places to help a new promotion grow. He also referenced recently-fixed issues behind the scenes while commenting on the balance of positive and negative optics in the industry. You can find a few highlights from Jericho and listen to the podcast episode below.

On giving Tony Khan suggestions to help AEW grow: “The short answer is yes. There’s also other people that are higher up in the company, we’re working together to suggest, and the thing with AEW is, we grew so fast. Look at our company now. Look at the infrastructure. I was reading WWE layoffs the other day, and there’s people, I’m like, what is this position? I don’t even know what this means. WWE has such a huge infrastructure. We do not. We need to grow that. But who’s the right people? We’ve got to identify the place where we need a little bit of growth and go from there. Tony is very organized, and Tony’s very passionate. But once again, here we are four years in. There’s a lot of stuff that none of us know. We’ve never ran our own company before, but we learned a lot from Vince. Tony’s Tony, Vince was Vince. You have to work within the boss’s system. It all rests in what Tony Khan want to do. What Tony Khan wants to do is continue to grow AEW. That’s what Chris Jericho wants to do, that’s what Bryan Danielson wants to do, that’s what Jon Moxley wants to do. So we’re all working together to patch up maybe some of the holes and continue to build this wall higher and higher and higher. To me, to see that growth so quickly is a little bit scary. We’re now figuring out what we need to do to continue to grow.”

On positive and negative press in the social media era: “We know the issues. The issues have been rectified. But the point is, there’s so much positive things going on. Those things are always kind of a little bit downplayed. But it’s the negative that gets focused on. I know what’s going on in the locker room. We know what areas we need to work on. Negative press is negative press. Once again, you still got, out of those 81,000 people, how many people know what even happened or really care? The hardcore and the journalists and the guys who do this care, and we should. But there’s also fans…how about being number one on cable four weeks in a row? The number one show out of all shows is AEW. So to me, that’s a huge positive that also gets kind of lost in the shuffle because somebody’s in a bad mood one day or whatever it might be. It happens, it’s wrestling. There’s gonna be issues from time to time.”