Several WWE Figures Took Issue With Vince McMahon’s Return

There have been several people within WWE that had an issue with Vince McMahon’s return, according to a new report.

Eric Young was going to return to WWE at some point this year, but it never actually happened because Young quietly requested his release back in April and returned to IMPACT Wrestling at the Slammiversary pay-per-view last Saturday.

There were plans for Young, who had been released by WWE previously in April 2020, to be part of a stable with Bray Wyatt, but it never actually made it to television.

When Eric Young signed a deal to return to WWE in late 2022, Vince McMahon was still retired (since July 2022) while WWE’s Chief Content Officer Paul “Triple H” Levesque was running the show creatively and managing the talent roster. Young worked closely with Triple H during his NXT days, so they had a good relationship. When Young made it to the main roster with his Sanity group, Vince McMahon just didn’t use him that much.

After the news came out in early 2023 that Vince McMahon was back in WWE as the Executive Chairman, Young decided to get out of his WWE deal. Without actually saying Vince’s name, Eric Young told Mike Johnson of PWInsider that was the main reason why he wanted out of WWE.

“I signed up for one thing and it turned into something completely different, and personally, professionally, and more importantly for me, morally, I just couldn’t work there anymore. If you’re a wrestling fan, you know what’s going on, and I know that you’re a smart guy, Mike, and you’re well aware of what I’m saying and what’s going on.”

“It was not, uh, a super difficult choice for me to be honest. I know it was a dream come true, going back, for sure. The contract was fantastic and all this other stuff and what I was poised to do on the TV show was excellent, but in the end, I would’ve had to answer to somebody that I’m just not willing to do. That’s where we ended up now.”

The moral issue regarding Vince McMahon likely has to do with the tens of millions of dollars that Vince has paid due to sexual misconduct and “hush money payments” involving numerous women that worked for WWE.

In the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, Dave Meltzer wrote that others within WWE had moral issues with Vince McMahon as well.

“The illusion was it was Vince McMahon’s return to power that he had a moral issue with. There were others who had expressed to us misgivings over that, some serious, but none who were going to quit their jobs over it.”

While Triple H remains in control of WWE as the guy running the show creatively, Vince McMahon has and will continue to tweak things as he has done in the past. That’s because Endeavor, which acquired WWE back in April, wants Vince to stay involved in the company moving forward. Whether wrestling fans, and even wrestlers, want that is another story, but it’s not up to them.