WWE released 18 wrestlers last Thursday, bringing the total number of wrestlers dropped by the company this year up to 72 (with one being rehired). Bryan Danielson, who spent over a decade with the company before moving over to AEW, was asked about those decisions while on Ariel Helwani’s The MMA Hour this week. Danielson started off by pointing out he’s related to WWE’s head of talent relations John Laurinaitis, but then called out his former company for their business practices.
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“One of the things that I’ve always had a hard time with, and I’ve been fired from WWE twice so I kind of get this — it’s one thing if somebody does something bad but like for example, if you’re under a contract with WWE and you’re not happy or you’re not happy with the company or whatever it is, if they can fire you and give you 90 days [then] you should be able to give them 90 days to be released from your contract,” Danielson said (h/t WrestlingNews.co). “On the flip side, if they are only firing you because of budget cuts where they are more profitable than ever, I just don’t think that’s right.”
Danielson then pointed out that some of the releases were the consequences of WWE’s own actions. Between the formation of AEW and WWE’s initial plan to launch NXT divisions around the globe, the company opted to gobble up as much independent wrestling talent as it could and lock in its current stars to lucrative, multi-year contracts in 2018-19.
“They signed a lot of people to high-end contracts when AEW kind of started to keep people from going to AEW or whatever. But then they realized, ‘oh, AEW can’t sign all of these people’…You offered them a contract to be with you for three years or whatever,” Danielson said. “If you overpaid them, that’s your bad and you’re still a very profitable company. That’s kind of my take on it. I wish they wouldn’t, you know what I mean? But I also understand it’s business in America [and] profits tend to be the most important thing a lot of times. You can even talk to the people within the companies. Like I love Vince McMahon, I do. I’ve learned so much from him but companies are not people anymore. They’ve taken on this whole — legally, they are their own corporation. For whatever reason, even good people make decisions that benefit a company that actually hurt the people that have worked so hard for the company. That’s hard on me mentally but that’s also the system that has been rewarded financially here in the United States.”
