Kofi says abrupt WWE exit made him wonder if wrestling career was over

Earlier this year, Kofi [Kingston] and Austin Creed [Xavier Woods] parted ways with WWE after reports of them being offered a pay cut emerged.

Recently speaking on The Ariel Helwani Show, just days after their AEW debut, Kofi revealed that they were offered more than a 50 percent pay cut by WWE. The former WWE Champion also claimed that the abrupt exit made him wonder if his wrestling career was over.

“Yeah, no, it’s a great question,” Kofi responded to Helwani’s question of if the exit ever meant that his wrestling career was over. “I don’t think it was a crisis of confidence, per se, but I did have those questions like, ‘Well, is this it? Do I want to keep doing this?’ If I would have known that my last match with WWE was going to be the SmackDown before Mania, then I might have, like, taken it in, you know what I’m saying?

“It just seemed like an abrupt end when I still have a lot of gas left in the tank. And I knew that this is not the way that I wanted my career to end. So I’m sure that I would have gotten in the ring somewhere to do something with somebody, right? So I could actually have an actual last match.

“But like I said, I have a lot of gas in the tank. So yeah, it wasn’t really a matter of confidence. Sometimes you want to write your story your way. You want it to finish the way that you want, not the way that somebody else tells you that it’s going to end. So yeah, that was one of the many emotions that were swirling around when we got the information,” Kofi finished.

Kofi was a part of the WWE roster for nearly two decades. A part of it from 2006 to 2026, and many believed him to be a WWE lifer. However, fate had other plans, and now Kofi and Creed are All Elites.

The New Level and Swerve Strickland are now set to defend their newly won AEW World Trios titles against The Rascalz on the upcoming episode of AEW Dynamite.