Zayda Steel Discusses Joining AEW After Leaving The WWE ID Program

Zayda Steel has opened up on her decision to join AEW after exiting WWE’s ID program.

On October 9, 2025, Zayda Steel announced that she would not renew her WWE ID contract and competed in her final televised match for the company during the October 22 episode of WWE Evolve. Steel went on to make her Ring of Honor debut in December before officially joining All Elite Wrestling in January.

Appearing on AEW Unrestricted, Zayda Steel opened up about her decision to walk away from WWE’s ID program and how she came to join All Elite Wrestling.

“I don’t know how much I can say, but I will say this. I chose to walk away from my previous employment by choice. I’m on my own journey. I love wrestling. I just want to be around people that love it just as much as I do. So I chose to walk away. My plans at first were to go to Japan. I was gonna take the last two, three months of the year as a little mental break, financial break, and I was gonna go overseas and do it the right way this time. And five days after I tweeted that tweet [about leaving WWE ID], Tony Khan texted me, so plans changed. I love wrestling, like I said, and this is my escape from reality. Once I started to feel like my only escape was work, I started to not like it and not have fun. I want to always love this, so I chose to walk away. As well as my mental, personally, I was losing myself. I was losing the love for wrestling, the only thing I’ve loved, so it was pretty quickly on that I was like, ‘Yeah, I need to do my own thing.’”

-Zayda Steel

Since officially becoming All Elite on January 18, Zayda Steel has competed across both AEW television and Ring of Honor and is a member of SkyFlight.

Prior to joining WWE’s ID program in November 2024, Zayda Steel had competed for the likes of Major League Wrestling and Dream Star Fighting Marigold. At just 22 years of age, she likely has a very bright future ahead of her.

As always, we’ll aim to provide any further updates on future plans for Zayda Steel as soon as we hear more.

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