Shane Helms Believes AEW Will Be Good Competition For WWE

“Hurricane” Shane Helms has only just begun his new journey with WWE. Helms recently started working as a backstage producer for the company. This is alongside both Sonjay Dutt and Abyss, who were also hired by WWE.

Helms recently caught up with Booker T on Booker’s podcast, Heated Conversations. During their discussion, he brought up All Elite Wrestling (AEW) and how he believes they will impact the wrestling business. He also spoke about AEW providing competition to WWE, potentially even heralding a modern version of the Monday Night Wars.

“[AEW] is gonna be good for the business,” he said. “Competition is good, there’s an excitement in the air. Those guys are some of my good friends, with Chris Jericho being a very close friend of mine. I’m excited to see what they do. We need that again, when the business was on fire with that Monday Night Wars. There’s a lot of people that thought that would never be duplicated, and it still might not this time, it’s still too early to say. But, if we can generate that excitement again — there’s a lot of crazy vibes in the air right now it seems to me.”

The only other company he compared AEW to was WCW — in his mind the last true company to offer true competition prior to WWE’s relative monopoly. Helms states that AEW are in a great position to learn from WCW’s mistakes, especially with how that company treated money and new acquisitions.

“[…] with WCW, they would just hire anybody back in the day, it didn’t matter if your a** was good or not. They were just giving money handouts as a fist. This company right here [AEW], they’re gonna be a little bit more smarter with their money and I think they’ll keep an eye on that. And those young guys, they know that. And two, that’s where Chris [Jericho] is gonna come in to play a little bit more than people realize, too. Because he was in WCW, he saw some of those mistakes so he’s gonna bring not just name value, and not just what he brings in the ring, but he’s gonna bring some business experience that they definitely need.”