WWE has released more than 50 wrestlers since the start of 2021, effectively flooding the free agency market for other major wrestling promotions. AEW president Tony Khan was asked to give his thoughts on the releases while on the Le Batard & Friends – South Beach Sessions Podcast and said (h/t Fightful), “Well, they had a really big roster and they’ve chosen to try to maximize their profit margins by letting talent go to reduce the amount of cost they have due to talent. So they had a lot of really good people and they’re making choices about why people have value to them. So I can’t say what number they’re trying to hit, but they’re definitely trying to hit a number there. So I think it’s about profitability, and they’re making choices I’m sure they don’t necessarily want to make, but they’ve let good people go in the process, absolutely.”
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“I think I can actually put them over and give them some credit here because they can’t keep every wrestler under their thumb, they just couldn’t do it,” he continued. “They tried to sign so many people and had cast such a wide net for so long, that inevitably, somebody with money and connections was going to be able to come in and start a wrestling business. The disconnect [for any other potential start-up], would be they were probably going to have to pass it off to somebody else to run the business. One of the real things I had going when we launched this company was all the institutional knowledge I’d built up over the years. You know, Dynamite is a show I’ve been writing on paper for over 25 years for 26 years, and Rampage, its sister show, is a show I conceived over 10 years ago. So I’ve been wanting to do this my whole life and I really just needed somebody to believe in me, which was TNT/WarnerMedia. I don’t think it was really possible to stop me in this case, because, you know, I would have found a media partner, I would have found wrestlers who wanted to work with me, and I would have been able to launch a show.”
A few stars who were released by WWE earlier in the year have already made the jump to AEW, including Andrade El Idolo, Malakai Black and the tag team 2.0. Other stars like Daniel Bryan (whose contract expired in late April), Bray Wyatt and Ruby Riott (now Ruby Soho) have also been rumored.
