Finn Balor Candidly Reveals Lowest Point Of His WWE Career
Finn Balor is currently living the high life on WWE Raw as one of the World Tag Team Championship but his time in the company has not always been so rosy.
After losing to Bray Wyatt at SummerSlam in 2019, Finn Balor’s WWE career was going nowhere fast. Despite being a multiple-time champion on the main roster, two months after his loss to Wyatt, the Irish star re-emerged in NXT to reinvigorate himself.
By 2022, Balor was back established on WWE’s main roster but again had started to float aimlessly until The Judgment Day fell into his lap thanks to Edge.
Speaking on the What’s the Story? Podcast, Finn Balor explained for the first time publicly how low he felt prior to joining The Judgment Day and explained the effect COVID had on his career and how he was left second-guessing his own talents:
I haven’t said this publicly, ever. But, the two months before I turned heel was probably the lowest I’d been in my career, with respect to investment level, the personal investment. I was just showing up, I was going, ‘Yeah, who do you want me to lose to today?’ It was just kind of the same sh*t that I’d been doing over and over again and I was doing the same act for so long and I just felt like I had so much more to give. But, it wasn’t anyone’s fault.
There was a lot of factors that led into this and one of them was COVID because COVID meant that my green card process got all f*cked up and then, because of that, I had to go home to Ireland for two months right before WrestleMania so then I was kind of out of the buildup to WrestleMania.
I came back right before WrestleMania, I was left off WrestleMania because there was no time to build a match so that then just starts to f*ck with your brain, going like, sh*t, why am I not on WrestleMania? I’m not good enough. But it wasn’t really that. It was just COVID had locked me in the U.S. for two years so then when the lockdown stopped, I needed to travel to Ireland to get all my visa and paperwork still sorted. That took so long because it’s the backup from the two years.
That then had an effect on the next couple of months of my career and it was right there that I was kind of left in limbo in the storylines, we’re just throwing sh*t at the wall and it was kind of Edge who was the one who said, ‘No, I want this guy. This guy, we’re not using him enough. I want him in Judgment Day’ and that’s kind of where things started to turn and then we went with the story of putting me and A.J. (Styles) and Liv (Morgan) together as a little kind of faction just so I had someone to turn on.
That was literally set up just for me to turn and originally, I was supposed to turn on A.J. but, then it all changed. I turned on Edge because I think someone got injured and they needed to turn Edge back babyface or something like that. One domino falls, the whole stack goes…
Finn Balor Battling His Own Insecurity
Finn Balor continued noting that his insecurities played a part in his thinking and said his new WWE contract has helped him get the rush back to continue trying to be the best:
And then when you’re that deep in the game, 20-plus years in the game, you’re thinking like, ah, people have seen me so much now. There’s all these new kids coming in, they’re way cooler. You kind of lose your cool, new, shiny toy feel.
When I came up in NXT and then I was Universal Champion, it’s like, I was the new kid on the block and everyone was interested and excited to see what he’s gonna do next but, everyone’s kind of seen everything I can do. So, I’m not doing anything new, I’m not doing any new tricks. You start to second-guess yourself and go, oh sh*t. What? Did I pass the expired date? And then with the contract coming up, looming and it’s four months, it’s three months and go, sh*t, I really should enjoy this one because this could be my last one. You just don’t know.
It’s obviously rooted in insecurity. It’s a mad feeling to then go from having so much insecurity and sh*t, am I gonna keep doing this? To then I’m signing a new deal and it’s like, rush of endorphins come back, the adrenaline comes back and the eagerness and the thirst comes back to like, yeah, I wanna show these people again. I wanna show everyone. I belong here, I still belong here and I’m gonna be the f*cking best at this.
Finn Balor captured the World Tag Team Championship with JD McDonagh recently with more than a little help from Liv Morgan. Balor might well find himself in a major program again very soon as the cracks in The Judgment Day continue to widen. The group might have a choice to make now Rhea Ripley has made her return to WWE and seems less than impressed at Liv Morgan having anything to do with the group.