Chris Jericho: WWE 'Hurt Their Own Brand' In War With AEW

Chris Jericho believes WWE hurt themselves through the various methods they try to use to get a better rating for NXT in their weekly competition on Wednesdays with All Elite Wrestling. 

Since WrestleMania 37, NXT has been on Tuesday evenings, bringing an end to the 18-month 'Wednesday Night War' between WWE's black-and-gold brand and AEW, although NXT Executive Producer Triple H adamantly declared with the switch that there was no war, describing it as 'imaginary'. 

Jericho has responded to Triple H's remarks, saying WWE will say the two companies weren't in a war because AEW had NXT beaten in terms of ratings. 

Speaking to The New York Post, Jericho said: "That’s typical WWE… It’s typical rhetoric. Because I believe that they congratulated us the first week and said, if you remember, ‘it’s a marathon, not a sprint.’ We won the marathon, right? So now it’s an imaginary war. Well then why were they saying it’s a marathon, not a sprint a year and a half ago when our first rating came out?”

"It will be there for the rest of time, it was an ‘imaginary war,’ and if it wasn’t a war why did they take Wednesday night the exact same time that we had? It was there to take away our ratings and for us not to get re-signed. Three months after that started we were re-signed to a hundreds-of millions-of-dollars extension. They failed.

"We’ve done a great job of putting on amazing television throughout this pandemic. We never took our eyes off the storytelling, which is what it’s all about. And we never lost our cool factor either, which I think NXT and WWE lost a lot of.

"They started kind of cutting off your nose to spite your face and just kept holding on and holding on and hurting their own brand and hot-shoting everything to get ratings and they just weren’t getting it. So whatever reason they left, good for them, they’re a great company."