CM Punk & AEW Had Been In Talks For 18 Months

After seven years away, CM Punk returned to professional wrestling to open AEW Rampage: The First Dance. The 42-year-old will be full-time in AEW and will be sticking around for the long term.

It emerged last month that AEW and Punk were in talks about an in-ring return, and The Straight Edge Superstar revealed during the post-Rampage media scrum that the two parties had been in talks for the last 18 months.

"I'll go ahead and spoil that I've been talking to Tony for probably a year and a half about this. Some girls are easy to get into bed. I am not. I need to do wined and dined. That's not, 'oh I need more money and less dates' and 'oh I need this and I need that.' It was literally just talking to Tony and getting to know him, and the more people that he employed that I knew, I'd ask them questions and they'd tell me things," Punk said.

"I've been in the game for a few minutes, you know, so I've seen that. I think I traced it back to, especially since the downfall of ECW, every six months to a year, somebody pops up, 'I have money, we're gonna have TV and we're going to use all the ECW guys.' This is not a slight on Tony at all. It's more of, it's more of a slight at me being a paranoid, neurotic, anxiety-ridden, very careful person, and I wasn't in a hurry.

"The pandemic kind of help that out, you know, and I knew I couldn't debut if there's no people in the building. So, I always say, timing is everything, and there were a lot of happy accidents along the way that made this possible."

Following his AEW debut, Punk will step inside the squared circle for the first time since 2014 at All Out on September 5 against Darby Allin.

H/T to Fightful