Adam Copeland/Edge didn't exactly shock the world when he signed with AEW and appeared at WrestleDream this past weekend, but his jumping ship from WWE was still significant.
The Rated R Superstar spent 25 years there but his latest WWE run, which saw him with the majority of his feuds, was something of a disappointment. He didn't hold championship gold and only worked what proved to be a relatively light schedule. Now, though, Copeland has elaborated on that and why it resulted in his departure.
"I kind of got the sense there wasn't really a plan [for me in WWE]," he tells CBS Sports. "I get it because what else do we do? What else is there to do? And after 25 years I've literally done everything there. So what do we do? It wasn't anybody's fault. I was coming up against creative walls too. I was having a hard time coming up with ideas and that's not usually the case. I think they were too."
"There was also the conundrum that I was contracted for 10 matches a year. I offered to do more, but to their point, it wouldn't feel quite as special, which I understood too. It just felt like neither one of us really had any ideas and that's never been the case before."
Copeland went on to admit that "retirement was a very, very real option" at the end of his WWE run and calls his final match against Sheamus on SmackDown "one of the most special nights in my career."
However, his decision to end his in-ring career in AEW - and that does appear to be the plan - boiled down to his wanting to go out on a high alongside former tag team partner and enemy (but real-life best friend) Christian Cage.
"If we could end this together, that's the dream," he admits. "I sat down with my girls and I'm like, 'OK, so what does dad do, girls?' What do I do? And I laid out the scenarios for them. Lyric said it and then Ruby agreed, 'Go be with Uncle Jay and have fun.' And that doesn't mean that I'm not having fun in other places, but they know the most fun I'm going to have is with my best friend of the last 40 years."
"I didn't know immediately, but I thought that's where I wanted to go. I really thought that working with Jay again was what I wanted to do and how I pictured it in a perfect world," Copeland continued. "Beth said, 'What's your perfect world? 'I was like, 'My perfect world is that I end my career with Jay.' So suddenly that perfect world looked like it could be there. It's tough to pass that up."
Do you think he made the right decision by signing with AEW? We're definitely intrigued to see how Tony Khan's company books the WWE Hall of Famer moving forward...