Major Update on FTR’s Future With AEW

FTR’s Dax Harwood spoke with Fightful this week ahead of his singles match with Bryan Danielson on Wednesday’s AEW Dynamite. 2022 will be a banner year for Harwood and Cash Wheeler for a number of reasons, the biggest of which is becoming triple champions by winning the ROH and IWGP World Tag Team Championships alongside their AAA World Tag Team Championship reign. But while the two are still gunning for a second reign as AEW World Tag Team Champions, their future with AEW already seems to be up in the air as their contracts are up in April 2023.

“However, he says he’s evaluating options and says that he and Cash have had a lot of conversations about their future,” Sean Ross Sapp wrote while previewing the interview on Fightful Select. “One particular idea they’ve mentioned is that they could take a year off of wrestling for major companies and just do things that are fun to them.”

Leaving AEW would immediately open the door for the pair to potentially return to the WWE. While they were actively turning down lucrative offers to stay with WWE in 2020, the landscape of that company has now drastically changed with Paul Levesque running the company’s booking following Vince McMahon’s departure. It was under Levesque’s leadership that FTR first found success as The Revival, winning the NXT Tag Team Championships twice before getting called up to the main roster. It was elsewhere in the same interview that Harwood said he feels loyalty to both Levesque and AEW President Tony Khan for the platforms they have given to himself and Wheeler. 

“I’m not going to say yes to it definitely being the same,” Harwood told ComicBook back in April when asked if his vision for tag team wrestling aligns with Khan’s. “I mean, we have our vision of tag team wrestling [and it] is completely different than probably anybody else’s in the world. And it should be. I mean, it would be really boring if everybody’s vision was exactly the same. But I think that we are still a brand new company. I think Tony is signing up the greatest talent in the world, not because he wants to lose money. He’s signing the best talent in the world right now, because he wants the fans to enjoy a product that he’s putting on.

“That’s the only reason. That’s the reason we have the greatest tag teams in the world working for us right now,” he continued. “Because he wants the fans to enjoy professional wrestling. And that’s it. And to see people, not our fans, because our fans are very smart, but to see people complain about that online blows my mind. You’re complaining about this man hiring CM Punk, or Daniel Bryan, or John Moxley, or FTR, or Sting or whoever, and I’m not categorizing ourselves with them, but I’m saying you’re complaining because he’s giving you a freaking treat man. He’s given you something you’ve never had before. A talent roster that you’ve never seen, that’s completely loaded. And so I hope he continues to bring in tag teams. I hope we bring in every single tag team in the world. Because I promise you the more he brings them in, the more Cash and I will step up and show that we are the best. And I think we’ve proved that we are the best because we’re so much different than everybody else. Man, I’m getting fired up because of that.”