Bobby Fish Explains His AEW Exit
Bobby Fish has explained why he chose to walk away from AEW after spending just nine months as part of the company’s roster.
Following his release from NXT, Bobby Fish became All Elite and kicked off his AEW career in fine fashion as he challenged Sammy Guevara for the TNT Title. It wasn’t long before Fish was surrounded by familiar company once again as both Adam Cole and Kyle O’Reilly joined Fish in AEW forming The Undisputed Elite.
However, by the summer of 2022, things went very wrong, very quickly for the group. Both Cole and O’Reilly have been ruled out of action for unspecified amounts of time due to injury and Bobby Fish took the decision to make his exit from the promotion.
Speaking on The Wrestling Perspective podcast, Bobby Fish explained that his decision to leave boiled down to dollars and cents:
“We just couldn’t agree on numbers. Numbers when — so after I got released [from NXT], literally right around the corner of that, I had some family stuff that came up that was very, you know just life stuff. Life happens, right? And so at that time, when the AEW option came to be, I wasn’t in a great headspace.”
“And had a new house, we were planning a wedding. And you know, the idea of another contract was safe, and that provided a certain amount of security. So probably jumped the gun or — you know, I don’t know how to phrase it. But I made sure that it was only a year. I did not want to do any more than a year for the numbers that we were talking.”
“At the end of that year the ink — because I felt like, ‘Okay, I will take this year and I’ll show you that you will want to pay me more.’ And we just didn’t see things the same way. And so it got to that point where it was like, ‘Okay, we’re not really even starting close to where we need to start to.’ So my agent and I were just like, ‘okay.’ He asked me at one point like, ‘Well, this is the number they’re starting at.’ And I said, ‘Well, let’s just walk away.’ So that’s what we did.”