Eric Bischoff Reveals Why He Thinks Vince McMahon Will Not Return To WWE Creative Team
Eric Bischoff has given his explanation for why he thinks Vince McMahon won’t be back as part of WWE’s Creative Team.
The news of Vince McMahon returning to the WWE Board of Directors last week was a bit of a shock to some people, but perhaps not a big surprise to others. Wrestling fans know that WWE is Vince McMahon’s life after he ran the company from the early 1980s until his ouster which led to his retirement in July 2022.
When Vince retired, it was due to reports of the 77-year-old paying “hush money” to multiple women over the last 20 years for more than $10 million. It led to a lot of bad press for WWE, so Vince opted for retirement.
Eric Bischoff is a man that competed against Vince McMahon when he was the WCW President in the late 1990s and also worked for Vince from 2002 to 2005 as the heel General Manager on WWE’s Monday Night Raw.
For now, Vince’s role is to sell the company while he has said that the management team will remain in place meaning his daughter Stephanie McMahon is still the WWE Chairwoman and Co-CEO with Nick Khan while Paul “Triple H” Levesque is still the WWE Chief Content Officer. That means Triple H has been running WWE’s main roster creatively post-Vince. However, there are concerns from some people that Vince will want to run WWE creatively again.
On the most recent of his 83 Weeks podcast, Eric Bischoff explained why he thinks Vince McMahon is too focused on business to think about being part of WWE’s creative team.
“I just can’t imagine that Vince’s primary focus right now is to jump back in the creative saddle. I mean there’s a ton on his plate, of a magnitude that I just don’t think even Vince McMahon, who notoriously works 20 hours a day, I think that would be a little bit much.”
“I think Vince is gonna be focused on stability, particularly outward-facing stability, which is why I think he went to great lengths to acknowledge Nick Khan and Stephanie and Paul Levesque in their roles and assure everybody, he did three times in one press release, or maybe in different comments, whatever, there were three different occasions that Vince made a point to say, ‘Hey, Paul and Nick and Stephanie are doing a great job. All the confidence in the world in them. Nothing is going to change.’”
“If that’s true, I think showing up at TV would be, even just from perception-wise, even if he just showed up and hung around backstage, it wouldn’t add to the stability of the situation right now. Couple weeks, maybe, once things settle down. But right now, I can’t see it.”
As Eric Bischoff continued talking with co-host Conrad Thompson, Eric spoke about how it was all about control for Vince, who is not a typical businessman
“Absolutely. That’s why I said I just can’t see the primary motivation here, even a secondary motivation in this whole thing, and again, I’m setting myself up to be absolutely wrong because we’re talking about Vince McMahon. Vince McMahon is not your typical human being and not your typical business person.”
“What would seem to make sense for most people may or may not apply to Vince here. The word we’ve used in the last minute or two is control. I think one thing we can all agree on, regardless of how we feel about Vince McMahon one way or the other, control has always been kind of the foundation upon which Vince McMahon operates.
“Go back to when he took the company public. I think your average person doesn’t necessarily understand , probably doesn’t even know that there are A shares and B shares. There are two different classes of shares. One class has voting rights. That’s the one Vince owns the majority of interest in, majority of shares. The other one is along for the ride. They don’t get to vote. I find it fascinating, among many other things, that Vince structured this company [this way] and was able to do so successfully…”
We will continue to provide updates on the WWE sale rumors as well as whatever involvement Vince McMahon has in the company in the weeks and months ahead.