Chris Jericho’s legacy: Ever since he joined AEW, I feel like he has lost a step or two

I’m not writing this column to be negative about Chris Jericho and his career, as I’ve been a big fan of his since he first started in WCW. I’ve met him a few times over the years, and he has always been great to his fans. I’m also a huge fan of Fozzy, even though that part of his life seems to have taken a backseat to his wrestling career. So, to say that I like Jericho and think he’s a future Hall of Famer is an understatement. But ever since he joined AEW, I feel like he has lost a step or two, and his stuff isn’t on the same level as it was in WWE.

When you look at Jericho’s career—from WCW, where he was willing to try new things to get himself over without the office knowing, to his jump to WWE, where he was able to hang with The Rock in his debut and slowly but surely found a way to climb the ladder to become a top-tier guy—Jericho has always been a strong performer who understood the game and evolved with it.

Then he made the jump to AEW. My first reaction when he made the move was that he would be a great asset for the company, as he was still viewed as a major name from WWE. He had just come off a big program with Kevin Owens that, while really convoluted, still found a way to get a decent ending. He was also one of those guys that fans saw as a WWE loyalist. So, it had a lot of potential to help AEW get off the ground and gain fans right off the bat—and it did at first. He won the AEW Championship, created a new character that actually worked, and even formed a faction—which was a first for him—to help him retain the title. This was a perfect way to get his AEW career started and show why he was such a big acquisition for AEW.

Then he dropped the title to Moxley, which I personally thought was a dumb move. Tony should have used Chris’s star power to make one of the younger guys, like Hangman Page, a bigger star. That’s where everything started to fall apart for Jericho.

For the last five years, he’s been in feuds with a lot of guys, formed not one but two factions after breaking up his original faction, and pretty much killed the momentum of everyone he was feuding with—and that’s where my problem with Jericho started.

Back when Jericho started in WCW, he was very vocal about how the top guys couldn’t care less about putting the younger guys over, that they were just there to relive their glory days and collect a paycheck. Fast forward almost 30 years, and Jericho has become exactly what he was preaching against. He’s a veteran hanging on way past his prime, putting himself over at all costs—even if it hurts his opponents’ momentum. His current run in AEW (and now ROH) is the equivalent of Ric Flair’s and Hogan’s run in TNA, and it’s hurting the company instead of helping it.

Look at some of his peers in the business right now. Cena knew when it was time to step back, and he’s doing it the right way. Seth Rollins and A.J. Styles have already talked about when they want to retire. Reigns is already semi-retired. Undertaker knew when it was time to retire and didn’t overstay his welcome. There are plenty of other examples like that in the business. Jericho isn’t one of them, and it’s hurting his legacy. He has overstayed his welcome and needs to realize that he could be more helpful backstage than as an active performer in 2025.

He’s the modern version of Flair, and it’s sad to see this happening to a performer like Jericho—someone who has been such a great talent for so many years. To see him become just a shell of his former self, relying on the same old tricks he’s been using since he joined AEW, is just plain sad. The fact that he still lives in his own world, thinking that fans hate him because of what his character is doing and not because they actually want him to go away and retire, is even sadder.

Chris in AEW had a lot of potential and should have been a game-changer for the company, but instead, he just became another failed experiment—another guy who lost all of his star power because of his own ego and stubbornness to hang on to his past accolades.

Jericho does have a Hall of Fame career and will probably be inducted into multiple Hall of Fames when he finally decides to retire—which I hope is soon—but his run in AEW is hurting his legacy more than helping it, and that’s a shame.