Most important 'former WWE wrestler' signing for AEW

[RedTwoster]

Throughout the years, AEW has made a number of key signings from WWE - many of which don't even feel like former WWE wrestlers anymore. My question is simple - which one has been the most important? 

I'm going to exclude ex-developmental wrestlers from this - people who did not wrestle on the main roster - otherwise Kenny Omega is technically eligible. I'm also including FTR as a tag team. I was in two minds about including Swerve given that he only wrestled one main roster match, but given that "Tony fumbled" is a thing, it seems only fair to include arguably the biggest example of a company 'fumbling' with a male wrestler in recent memory. 

I'm also including former AEW wrestlers. CM Punk ended up crashing and burning, but it's hard to deny that he was involved in some of the greatest feuds in the history of the company when it comes to his rivalries with MJF and Eddie Kingston. Same goes for Cody Rhodes - his value to the company's history is obvious. 

If it was my favourite signing, I'd probably have selected Christian Cage. He has redefined his legacy in a way no one predicted. 

However, as far as the 'most important' signing goes I'm going to go with - perhaps controversially - this guy...

His debut marked a momentum shift - signifying that AEW had truly arrived and could compete with WWE. He would go on to have legendary rivalries, then utterly fuck up the company for a few years. AEW lost the good feeling that it had - then slowly clawed it back, having two of the best years in the company's history in 2025 and 2026. It's hard to dispute that the company is on anything other than an all-time high after All In this year. 

Without Punk, I'm not sure that would have happened - he seems to have redefined Tony Khan's policy when it comes to signing people. If someone is going to create disharmony, you don't need them. Malaki Black won't return, nor will Miro if he's ever released. I highly doubt Punk himself would get another chance. At the moment, AEW seems to have a locker room full of wrestlers who love the company and want to put on the best show that they possibly can, and it's led to a real golden spell. 

It's also shown that the company can bounce back from a slump - something that WCW and TNA were never able to do, at least not in a significant way. TNA still exists, but it's not been able to get back to the heights it once reached. 

So in a weird way, I think Punk's signing has ended up being an enormous positive for AEW precisely because of how it panned out. It's shown that the company is resilient, and it's probably led to an even better product.

Edited September 1 by RedTwoster

[DavidB6937]

Upsets me to do so but Jericho. I don't think they get to where they are today without him. I agree with the Punk momentum etc but none of that happens without Jericho in the first place for me.

[Arch Stanton]

I think they would have managed just fine without any of them individually, but certainly Jericho was incredibly important for building the brand name in the early years, Punk was huge for them throughout his short spell and Mox has been a main player for a sustained amount of time. I voted for Swerve though, he's somebody that arrived without fanfare or any 'Ex-WWE guy' stigma attached to him and they were able to develop him into one of the biggest and coolest stars on the roster. They built a legitimate main event act for the present and future and he feels like one of their own, I think that's more important for them than the impact of any veteran making the jump. 

[sivy]

I think it’s Mox to me, he debuting at the first PPV at the end to winning the belt. Then when anyone was needed to fill a role he was always the go to guy. 

[BomberPat]

Jon Moxley is the one for me. CM Punk would be a close second and a real statement of intent that this was a promotion to be taken seriously, and Chris Jericho probably gave them a fair bit of clout with TV networks and the like early on, but Jon Moxley is the first guy to truly jump ship, to walk away from a top spot in WWE and choose to work for AEW. 

I think in the long term we might be able to look back and say Mercedes or Toni Storm, depending on the path that the women's division takes and how it evolves. I think there's a strong argument for Bryan Danielson as a hybrid of Punk and Moxley, of a statement signing on the level of a CM Punk who actively opted for AEW over WWE when it mattered - it's easy to forget that Bryan had main evented Wrestlemania the year he signed with AEW. 

A lot of these names are so beyond being an "ex-WWE" name at this point, that it's more indicative of how many people WWE had under contract and squandered than of how many of them AEW signed. I'd struggle to think of Swerve Strickland as a "WWE guy" in any meaningful sense. In terms of importance as a signing, I wouldn't put him anywhere near on the level of a Punk, Danielson, Jericho, Moxley, or Mercedes, but in terms of what he signals to people in WWE - that if they don't value you here, and you want to take a bet on yourself, you can come here and if you're able to prove your worth there's a good chance they'll listen - he might be unmatched.

A weird dark horse choice too - Paul Wight. Jericho had been doing his NJPW dates and getting a feel for working outside of WWE, a lot of the other people on the list had that history. Paul Wight might not have made much of an impact in AEW, but when his signing happened I felt like it was a real tipping point where even people you would have assumed were WWE lifers that wouldn't even entertain the thought of working anywhere else were fair game. 

[LaGoosh]

A very close gap between Mox and Jericho but I have to go with Jericho. I don't think it's recognised how important he was to AEW at the start. His hiring instantly made the company feel like a real thing and not just TNA 2.0. He was fantastic in the early days and I don't think it's an understatement to say he carried the company through those tough COVID times. I don't think they would have survived without him. And he did a lot to establish guys like Darby, Orange Cassidy, Eddie Kingston, MJF and others as featured top acts. Additionally when the shit hit the fan with the Punk/Elite stuff Jericho stepped up big time and had one of the best years of his career.

Mox absolutely is the heart and soul of the company and no doubt long term will be one of if not the most valuable guys they ever had but without Jericho steering the ship in that important early period I don't think there even would be an AEW still around. 

My personal choice is Toni Storm. I miss her. She's genuinely one of my favourite ever wrestlers. 

[Statto]

My knee-jerk reaction is Danielson, on the basis he'd been a genuine top star for WWE right up until his departure - as Pat has noted, he was in the main event of Wrestlemania not 5 months before turning up in AEW, and his only other match after that was a title vs career match vs Reigns.

He's also Bryan f'n Danielson and in terms of the style of wrestling that ultimately birthed AEW, there's no-one more significant than him.

Danielson walking out in AEW felt absolutely seismic to me.

[Carbomb]

Genuinely surprised that Cody Rhodes has garnered no mention - from what I read on here, and what little I saw online, one could potentially make the argument that, without Cody betting on himself, going into business for himself with the first ever All-In and sparking the imagination and interest in enough fans that there could be a potential alternative to WWE to step into the space that TNA receded from, you don't have such solid foundations, excitement, and goodwill for AEW to hit the ground running as they did. Would anyone have even tried if a name like Cody Rhodes hadn't taken such a big risk? The Bucks and Omega couldn't have done it by themselves - they needed his name value, or otherwise they would've just been seen as some big indie blokes. I know he wasn't a huge name at the time, but he was big enough for people to sit up and pay attention. And would they have got Jericho if he hadn't?

Edited September 1 by Carbomb
Florin Raducioiu

[HarmonicGenerator]

16 minutes ago, Carbomb said:

Genuinely surprised that Cody Rhodes has garnered no mention - from what I read on here, and what little I saw online, one could potentially make the argument that, without Cody betting on himself, going into business for himself with the first ever All-In and sparking the imagination and interest in enough fans that there could be a potential alternative to WWE to step into the space that TNA receded from, you don't have such solid foundations, excitement, and goodwill for AEW to hit the ground running as they did. Would anyone have even tried if a name like Cody Rhodes hadn't taken such a big risk? The Bucks and Omega couldn't have done it by themselves - they needed his name value, or otherwise they would've just been seen as some big indie blokes. I know he wasn't a huge name at the time, but he was big enough for people to sit up and pay attention. And would they have got Jericho if he hadn't?

There’s definitely some truth to that, but his return to WWE and subsequent main event star treatment does lend itself to the suggestion that all the above was a means to an end, and his going into business for himself was ultimately so he could go back into business with WWE.

I picked Danielson, kind of because he feels like the opposite of that. He’d reached the top in WWE - he’d main evented Mania just months before, as has been pointed out - but chose to come to AEW and appeared to be/actually was genuinely happy to do so. He made the most of it, had some fantastic matches and storylines, wrestled some dream opponents, and finished his career how he wanted, which as it turned out was in AEW*. I’m surprised after Danielson’s Wembley win and Sting’s retirement that more old-timers don’t want to head that way to finish up.
 

*ignoring the Death Rider murder as we all should.

[Carbomb]

1 hour ago, HarmonicGenerator said:

There’s definitely some truth to that, but his return to WWE and subsequent main event star treatment does lend itself to the suggestion that all the above was a means to an end, and his going into business for himself was ultimately so he could go back into business with WWE.

Should that be considered relevant to the question, though? Regardless of where he ended up in the end, and the intentions behind it all, the fact remains the groundwork he laid down was very important to AEW in the final analysis.

Edited September 1 by Carbomb
Alan Kernaghan

[Chris B]

1 hour ago, HarmonicGenerator said:

There’s definitely some truth to that, but his return to WWE and subsequent main event star treatment does lend itself to the suggestion that all the above was a means to an end, and his going into business for himself was ultimately so he could go back into business with WWE.

I don't think that changes his importance to AEW - it changes how important AEW was to him. Same with your point with Danielson, it's more about how important AEW is to him.

Cody is, for me as well, the most important signing they had. It's not just that he was a name - him being able to represent himself with the media as well as he did, and also how he talked about (and showed) how different AEW was going to be was really important. While that includes the All In publicity, I think it's an oddly important point that he was going for the NWA title as well - and then, with the Dustin match, that was as big a blood-soaked 'this isn't WWE' statement as they could make. And while his promos became formulaic, he knocked some out the park in the early days too.

Then, after that, him going back to WWE was, weirdly, important as well. It wasn't necessarily good for AEW, but it was great for wrestlers. To really show that there was the option to go back and forward again, and to reinvent himself the way he did - a world where Cody isn't a multi-time Wrestlemania Main Eventer is, I think, a worse one for how AEW is perceived.

Cody's self-belief was big enough that I think it lifted AEW for a bit. I don't think it gets quite where it was without him trying to prove that he deserved more.

[BomberPat]

I think the only distinction with Cody is that I don't think of him as a "signing" - he was a founder, on-board from day one. That might be nitpicking, but it's why I wouldn't consider him in the same sense I would Moxley or Punk.

Absolutely agree that it's unlikely the promotion exists at all without him, though. Given the success of the Bullet Club merch, and Tony Khan wanting to get into the business regardless, maybe we end up with a version of AEW still with Kenny and the Bucks, but Cody definitely felt like the driving force to making it happen when it did, and he was the public face of it all. I said in the AEW retrospective thread that in those early shows, Cody's booking and presentation are all over the place but the audience support him because there's still so much goodwill behind him, and a huge part of that is that Cody, more than Kenny or the Young Bucks, even more than Tony Khan, was the public face of AEW, he was the guy making it happen and going up against the WWE machine, and it was only when that goodwill and that association with the promotion began to wear off that audiences started to turn on him.

Cody's biggest strength is in making you care about a single match, and his biggest weakness is keeping consistent when he has to be a regular TV character instead. In those first months of pre-Dynamite AEW, you couldn't ask for a better person than Cody to carry the brand, because it was perfect for him.

[LaGoosh]

Cody was vital to the founding of AEW, that can't be denied. But equally after it was founded he became irrelevant very quickly. After just a few months of TV he could have left and no one would have cared too much.

[Carbomb]

4 minutes ago, LaGoosh said:

Cody was vital to the founding of AEW, that can't be denied. But equally after it was founded he became irrelevant very quickly. After just a few months of TV he could have left and no one would have cared too much.

Which makes for a good chunk of debate, because then the question comes down to a question of what metric you use to define "best signing".

Throughout this thread, there have been cases made for most of the people listed in the poll, and they're all valid.

 

Without Cody, AEW might not have taken off so well.

Without Jericho, AEW might not have taken on the air of legitimacy it needed to be seen as more than just an ambitious indie.

Without Moxley, AEW might not have been seen as a viable career alternative for established wrestlers who felt they were getting nowhere in the WWE system.

Without Punk, AEW might not have been seen as a genuine competitor to WWE in the fans' eyes in terms of star power.

Without Danielson, AEW might have missed out on a big-time body of work that contributed immeasurably to their creative resumé, and their competitiveness with WWE in terms of the actual product.

Without Toni Storm, AEW's perception in popular culture might not be quite there - from what I understand, a lot of non-wrestling fans came into contact with a lot of her output. And, obviously, the women's side of our great sport might not be in the shape it is now.

Without Swerve, AEW might not have become a place that offered up-and-comers the space to not feel pressured to accept whatever bollocks WWE chose to dish out, and potentially develop their careers via an alternative route.

 

What I've seen of Christian Cage in AEW, he's been a ton of fun, but I can't think of a way in which he'd be their most important signing. Same with Mercedes Moné, though she obviously was important.

 

I wonder if an honourable mention might be made for Sting or Cope?

[DavidB6937]

9 minutes ago, Carbomb said:

I wonder if an honourable mention might be made for Sting or Cope?

Sting's been around the block and also worked for TNA so as much as I love the guy, I'm not sure he comes even close to being that important to AEW.

Cope? Hmm. Maybe you can take the 'WWE lifer' argument with him but I dunno, I feel like Danielson jumping really had the 'anyone can cross over!' scenario covered. Bryan and Punk felt pretty seismic. I never got that feeling with the Rated R Soooooooooperstar.