Triple H on Former NXT Stars Joining AEW

04/18/2022 04:51 pm EDT

All Elite Wrestling has quite a few former WWE stars on its roster, many of whom had runs in NXT and trained at WWE Performance Center as part of their developmental system. That includes six of the 20 men who have held the NXT Championship, including Adam Cole (who still holds the record for longest NXT Championship reign) and Samoa Joe (the only man to win the title three times). Triple H gave an interview with The Athletic this week and was asked about those wrestlers who have made that jump to the young promotion that was once competing head-to-head with NXT on Wednesday nights. 

"I like all those guys," he said. "They helped us get where we needed to get, and I'm thankful for it. The truth is there was a period of time where we were trying to build NXT. We built NXT. Then we were trying to build a brand that could get a television show and sustain it. All those names helped us get there. Whether anybody believed or not they fit on 'Raw' or 'SmackDown,' those aren't necessarily my decisions solely, and they're Vince's (McMahon) decisions and fans' decisions; and then, can we continue to do business with them?

"If they have great gigs, I'm happy for them. I stay in touch with almost all of them. I like to think they came into us here, we taught them a lot, got them to (a higher level) where they learned how to do television, how to be professionals and all that to be successful there," he added. "At some point, they might come back with us, or they might never because they don't fit our brand as well, but that's OK. They got us to certain places, and I'm thankful for that, and they're thankful for that, and they're off to different things. But that doesn't stop the train. People leave football teams, move to different teams all the time, and it's great."

He also talked about AEW as competition for the WWE and how that benefits the wrestling world as a whole — "As far as the competition aspect goes, it's great. It makes everybody sharper. You get lazy if you're all there is and everybody goes about their business. The end of the day, it'll make us better, and we'll all be better for it. All those things have forced us to be in a better place right now. Not that we wouldn't have gotten there anyway, but we had to do it quicker in some manner. That's an important piece of it, right?"

He continued, "As long as there aren't things hurting the business overall, I think any of that stuff is good. If you're a 6-year-old kid, you turn on the TV, wrestling is on and you like it. Now you're caught up in it. Then you start sampling all of it. You get to where you're a huge fan. That's the money. There's room for everybody to do it. It's like saying the USFL or XFL is starting up and the NFL is panicking about market share. It's just going to increase people's love for football. If you love football that much, you'll watch all of the football, and it's great. But the NFL is not sweating that."

Disclosure: ComicBook is owned by CBS Interactive, a division of Paramount. Sign up for Paramount+ by clicking here.