Why Tommaso Ciampa Really Chose AEW Over WWE

Tommaso Ciampa has opened up about how financial decisions were at the heart of his joining AEW over staying with WWE.

Tommaso Ciampa recently made his AEW debut just days after leaving WWE. Ciampa answered Mark Briscoe’s open challenge for the TNT Title, and in his first match in AEW, Ciampa won the championship.

But it seems Ciampa’s decision to join AEW was less about in-ring success and more about stability at home.

Tommaso Ciampa Explains AEW Decision

Speaking on Close Up w/ Renee Paquette, Tommaso Ciampa explained his decision to join AEW, and noted that he didn’t necessarily feel loved back by the business during his last few years with WWE:

Every performer, specifically people who’ve come up through the independent scene, you love the business. And the thing you really genuinely want is for it to love you back. And like I’ve been told numerous times, this isn’t the business. The business doesn’t love you back.

But like I’m an optimist, you know, so like I think it’s not going to love you back 100% of the time. But those moments when it does, like we thrive for that, you know? So that’s what I feel like.

So it’s a lot of that going on right now for me, where it’s like, ‘oh man, I haven’t felt loved back for a bit.’ So that was big, but at home, you know, honestly, it was less about just like looking forward to, ‘oh, we’re doing this AEW thing’ because it was a ton of uncertainty. Like our decision to move on. We talked about that for months. I might even say a couple years, realistically. That’s a big thing, right? [Regularly checking his bank account and understanding his financial stability].

Tommaso Ciampa continued, noting that the financial stability offered by AEW helped make his decision to join Tony Khan’s company:

To be honest, that’s the biggest thing that you start to go is like we are getting a definitive income, it’s a salary. And you know what the independent scene’s like, you understand the travel if you start to go to different countries to do this and stuff, and what’s that impact on Willow, what’s the impact on my wife?” Ciampa added.

And just the life we live, so there’s just the biggest decision of it all was like, are we finally ready to do it, you know, and like when I left NXT to make the move to the main roster. Financially, we were not ready to do that, and we knew it. So, there was not really a question of, ‘okay, let’s take a risk. Let’s bet on ourselves.’ We got at that time a three-year-old, now a seven-year-old. It just wasn’t in the cards. Yeah. But now I’m starting to go, yeah, I think we are at the point financially, let’s take the risk.