Tommaso Ciampa has revealed why he left WWE.
The former NXT Champion made his surprise AEW debut at this week\'s Dynamite, only days after announcing the end of his 11-year stint with WWE.
During an interview with Sports Illustrated, the wrestling veteran explained the reasoning behind this decision. Tommaso Ciampa mentioned that there wasn\'t a single factor or incident that led to this change. It\'s something he had been thinking about as his WWE contract was coming up, and he felt like AEW was the right place for him to be in this stage of career:
“If I wrestled in the 90s, I’d wanna be a part of ECW… Early 2000s, you wanna be a part of Ring of Honor. I was lucky I got to do that a little bit. 2010s, I think for me at least, I wanted to be part of NXT Black and Gold. And when I looked at the landscape of professional wrestling in the 2020s… the answer was AEW, man. That’s what I want to be a part of.”
The 40-year-old talked about his lacklustre main roster run since his 2022 Raw debut. Tommaso Ciampa believed that he was actually a better performer now than a few years ago, but people were not giving him the credit for it. The desire to prove himself as such, led to him jumping ship:
“For a long time, I had to listen to people tell me, not so much directly to my face but more so online, that 2018 was prime Ciampa. I’m a hundred times better now than I was then. That was nothing. That was absolutely nothing.
I’m physically better. I’m mentally sharper. My storytelling, my psychology is on a whole different level than it was back then… what people are about to see is going to blow their minds. It’s gonna shock the world, because I finally have a shot to find out if I’m as good as I think I am.”
Tommaso Ciampa answered the open challenge issued by TNT Champion Mark Briscoe upon his AEW debut. The match between the two is set to take place on AEW Collision this Saturday.
