The once one-way street between WWE and AEW has expanded. For AEW’s first three years of existence, every talent switch that happened between the two biggest professional wrestling companies in the world saw WWE stars defect to the land of All Elite. That changed in April 2022 when AEW co-founder Cody Rhodes made the jump back to WWE. Rhodes would be followed to WWE by AEW stars Brian Pillman Jr. (Lexis King), Jade Cargill, CM Punk, Shawn Spears, Ethan Page, William Regal, and Bea Priestley (Blair Davenport). With contracts expiring sporadically throughout the calendar year, whispers of the next AEW-to-WWE defections remain as persistent as ever.
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CM Punk Teases Future WWE Signings
The Second City Saint has his eyes on a couple of unnamed future free agents.
Speaking to KTSM, CM Punk teased that if he were to lead a faction again in WWE, his ideal stablemates would come from elsewhere.
“Everybody who would be apart of that is not necessarily here as a hire yet,” Punk teased.
While Punk could be alluding to anyone in the larger wrestling world, the former WWE Champion has not been shy about his admiration for a large sum of the AEW roster, many of which he used to share a locker room with. Punk had a brief unit with FTR (Dax Harwood and Cash Wheeler), teaming together on the first-ever episode AEW Collision. Both Harwood and Wheeler are unlikely to ever go back to WWE, as they re-signed with AEW in early 2023 and declared that those contracts would be their final deals before retiring from wrestling.
Punk’s final television feud in AEW was against Ricky Starks, a talent who is currently estranged from AEW. Starks was slated to headline AEW All Out 2023 against Punk but was pivoted out of that spot after Punk was fired from the company days before that pay-per-view went down.
“I have no answers. People ask me all the time, ‘Well, why aren’t you…?’ I don’t know. I have no clue. That isn’t up to me,” Starks said earlier this year when asked about his AEW absence. “It does suck, obviously, to not be on TV, but the support in people online and people sending me messages is very, very sweet and endearing, and very encouraging, from that standpoint.”
WWE NXT reportedly has “significant interest” in signing Starks when he becomes a free agent.
Punk battles Drew McIntyre inside Hell in a Cell this Saturday, October 5th at WWE Bad Blood.
