Bryan Danielson didn’t renew his contract with WWE earlier this year and ended up signing with AEW. Obviously, Danielson being a big star, he could’ve signed with any promotion he wanted.
In an appearance on The MMA Hour with Ariel Helwani, Danielson talked about the other options he had.
“No, no I hadn’t,” Danielson said. “I thought it could be, and it wasn’t even like, ‘I’m leaving and going to AEW.’ I was legitimately thinking, ‘This might be my last full-time wrestling match. I might do things here or there, whatever.’ But I honestly didn’t know. I took the summer to decide, and it took me a long time to decide. I had a lot of fun in WWE and there’s a lot of people that I love and respect there that made it really hard for me to leave. A large portion of my family actually works there. I just have a lot friends, there’s a lot of great people that work there.
“So I was contemplating that. I was contemplating AEW. I was contemplating just not signing a contract with anybody and just doing shots here and there, and I was also contemplating staying at home and being a full-time dad. I love being at home with my kids, so those were the four options on the table.”
“There was just something exciting about it, and a little scary,” Danielson said. “You know how you get comfortable doing something for too long? There was just something exciting about [AEW], and there was just also this idea in my mind. I tried not to, and for the most part I didn’t, but in my WWE matches. I could go out there and kind of sleepwalk through them if I wanted to. In AEW, you can’t, because everybody is doing so much. So much so that I was watching one of their shows and I was like, ‘I don’t even know if I can wrestle here. These guys are doing so much and I think this might be dangerous for me.’
“I had mentioned that to Jon Moxley, we were just texting about something or whatever, and I just said that to him. He said ‘dude, you’re Bryan Danielson. You can do any of this. You don’t have to do what these guys are doing, you can create your own thing.’ But there were a lot of reasons why I went to AEW, there’s a lot of reasons why I wanted to stay with WWE. So it was just kind of, it was a really tough decision.”
H/T to Wrestling Inc for the transcription