Chris Jericho’s AEW Farewell Tour: Who Deserves to Send Off a Legend?

With Jericho’s re-signing widely read as the last chapter of his in-ring career, picking his final opponent isn’t just booking — it’s legacy management.

Every so often, a wrestling storyline stops being about a match and starts being about a career. That’s where Chris Jericho sits right now. His re-signing with AEW back in April is broadly believed to be the final contract of a run that started in the late ’80s in Calgary and touched just about every major promotion on the planet. When speculation started swirling over who will be Chris Jericho’s final AEW opponent, it wasn’t idle chatter. It’s the kind of decision that gets replayed on retrospectives for the next thirty years, and getting it wrong would be a genuine waste.

So let’s treat it like what it is: a legacy-defining call. Here’s the context a newer fan needs, why the choice matters more than usual, and where I think this realistically ends.

Why This One Is Different

Retirement matches are tricky because most wrestlers don’t get to script them. Bodies break, contracts lapse, promotions change direction. Jericho is one of the rare few who has both the standing and, apparently, the runway to actually design his own send-off. That’s a privilege very few earn.

Consider the sheer breadth of what this man has already done. WCW cruiserweight upstart. Attitude Era antagonist. The first Undisputed Champion in WWE history. A reinvention machine who turned “The List” and a scarf into main-event heat in his fifties. And in AEW specifically, he was arguably the single most important veteran signing the company ever made — the credibility bridge that told skeptical fans a new promotion could actually be a big deal. He was AEW’s first World Champion. He gave the company its early identity when it desperately needed one.

That’s the weight hanging on this final opponent decision. You’re not just booking a match. You’re deciding what the last image of a Hall of Fame career looks like, and — just as importantly — who gets the rub of being the person the industry trusted to close the book.

The Two Philosophies at War

Broadly, there are two schools of thought on how you book a legend’s finale, and they pull in opposite directions.

The first is the nostalgia route: pair Jericho with a peer, a fellow all-timer, and let two legends have one last dance for the emotion of it. It’s the safe, sentimental play. It guarantees a big moment and a loud pop. But here’s my problem with it — it’s a dead end. If Jericho’s final match is against someone in the same career phase, the win means nothing going forward. Nobody gets elevated. It’s a photo op, not a passing of the torch.

The second is the elevation route: put Jericho across from a younger talent on the rise and let him do the last, best thing a veteran can do — lose clean and make a star on the way out. This is the harder, more selfless option, and frankly it’s the one that separates the truly great from the merely famous. Ric Flair understood this. So did plenty of others whose farewells actually meant something beyond the night itself.

Jericho, to his enormous credit, has spent his AEW tenure being a giving performer far more often than a selfish one. His entire “Learning Tree” run leaned into being a grumpy, pompous veteran gatekeeper — a gimmick specifically designed to be overcome by hungry challengers. That character work reads like a man setting the table for exactly this kind of ending.

Who Actually Fits the Moment

Let me be crystal clear here, because the rules of this beat matter: I’m not reporting a plan, a match, or anyone’s intentions. This is my read on who makes sense creatively. AEW has not announced a final opponent, and anyone who tells you they know the ending for certain is guessing.

That said, the roster is loaded with candidates who’d benefit from being “the guy who beat Jericho last.” AEW’s homegrown class — the wrestlers the company built from the ground up rather than importing — is exactly where that rub would do the most long-term good. A win over Jericho carries a specific kind of weight because he predates all of them; he’s a link to eras they only watched on TV. That’s the whole point of the elevation play.

There’s also a strong case for someone with personal history with Jericho. AEW’s early years were defined by his feuds, and revisiting one of those with the roles reversed — the veteran now the obstacle, the former rival now the one sending him off — would give the finale a narrative spine instead of just a marquee.

The version I’d push hardest against is the one where Jericho goes out over a fellow legend or, worse, goes out winning. A veteran winning his own retirement match is one of the most self-defeating booking choices in wrestling. It prioritizes ego over the future, and Jericho has spent too long building the “Learning Tree” premise of talent overcoming him to fumble the payoff now.

Where I Think This Lands

My honest read: this ends with Jericho putting over a younger star, and it should. The character he’s played for the back half of his AEW run only makes sense if someone finally chops the tree down. The whole arc has been a setup for a graduation moment — the old gatekeeper falling so the next generation can walk through the door he’s been blocking.

The smart move is to make the finale a genuine event, build to it over months rather than weeks, and let the loser walk away having handed something concrete to the winner. If AEW nails that — a clean finish, a career-making rub, a heartfelt goodbye — it becomes one of the defining moments in the company’s history and a masterclass in how to retire.

It’s worth remembering this is a company still writing its own legend, the same one that just added rising talent like Mara Sadé to its roster while managing veterans and quieter roster situations like Sammy Guevara’s. Getting Jericho’s exit right is a statement about what AEW values — the past or the future. I hope they choose the future.

Who do you want to see send Jericho into the sunset — and would you ever let him go out on a win? Drop your pick in the comments.