Tommaso Ciampa says financial stability led him to choose AEW over WWE
In a recent interview, Tommaso Ciampa opened up in detail about the financial stability and decision to choose AEW over WWE.
Speaking on Close Up w/ Renee Paquette, Ciampa revealed why he decided to join hands with Tony Khan’s promotion after finishing up 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,” Ciampa said. “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].”
While he made the decision now to move on, Ciampa believes he was not financially ready to do so during his WWE main roster jump from NXT. Financially comfortable in his life, Ciampa took the “risk” and joined AEW.
“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.”
Following the expiration of his WWE contract earlier this year, Ciampa filed the trademark for “Psycho Killer” before making his AEW debut on the January 28th episode of Dynamite. Shortly after, he defeated Mark Briscoe to crown himself the new TNT Champion.
Shounak Chakrabarti is an experienced sports journalist with a lifelong passion for athletics and storytelling. He holds a Master’s Degree in International Journalism from the University of Leeds and joined F4WOnline in 2025.
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