On This Day in 2022: AEW All Out 2022 ends with CM Punk’s backstage altercation dominating headlines

Four years ago, AEW All Out 2022 delivered a show that should have been a landmark moment for the promotion — CM Punk recapturing championship gold, MJF and Jericho doing what they do, Bryan Danielson reminding everyone why the mat still matters, The Acclaimed getting their flowers from a crowd that had been waiting to give them. By any normal metric, it was a strong night of wrestling. But the match results were an afterthought before the weekend was out, buried under the weight of what happened after the cameras stopped rolling.

The post-show press conference became something uglier and more consequential than anything that happened between the ropes. What followed backstage — the altercation pulling in Punk and figures central to AEW’s locker room — wasn’t just a bad night. It was the moment the promotion’s internal fault lines became impossible to ignore from the outside. AEW had always carried a reputation as a talent-first company, a creative sanctuary built on relationships and respect, and that mythology took serious structural damage. The fallout didn’t resolve cleanly or quickly, and the turbulence it created shaped the trajectory of major names on the roster for months.

The tragedy of All Out 2022 isn’t that things went wrong — wrestling has always had chaos behind the curtain — it’s that the chaos consumed what was, on paper, a night worth celebrating. Moxley, Punk, MJF, Danielson, The Acclaimed: that’s a constellation of talent that any era of any promotion would kill to have on one card. When the story of a show becomes entirely about what didn’t happen on camera, it’s a reminder that in professional wrestling, the most damaging losses are never the ones that get counted in the ring.