Why It’s Time For WWE To Play The Ultimate Trump Card

Again, it's vital to stress that Vince McMahon, Nick Khan and whoever else sits at the top table do not give a single sh*t about any of this feeling of the tide shifting, or AEW being the new home of professional wrestling, or any of that.

They're releasing wrestlers on an unprecedented scale, and many of those have taken the same route as the names that have shook the wrestling world in recent weeks.

Ruby Soho's the latest but she probably won't be the last. Malakai Black rocked the industry when he rocked Cody's head with Black Mass. Miro shook off a ropey start to kick your f*cking *ss for ever doubting him. Hard to imagine his "hot wife" won't be by his side soon enough. Ever-Rise were p*ss f*cking funny on NXT for a full year, and have been rewarded within their first month as AEW wrestlers by getting to interact with CM Punk and Sting. As Cody coyly put it in EVP mode before not signing Matt Cardona in 2020, it's "All Elite Wrestling, not All Friends Wrestling", but a) let's be honest, it sort of f*cking is the second one isn't it Paul Wight, and b) Cardona reinvented himself so spectacularly in a short GCW run that AEW feels more of an inevitability than it did 12 months ago.

Nick Khan saw all those names on a spreadsheet and wanted to delete the cells so the figure at the bottom went down. Vince McMahon co-signed it. They didn't try to keep them.

But they tried to keep Adam Cole. They tried to keep Daniel Bryan. They tried to keep Jon Moxley in 2019. They tried to sign Cody Rhodes, The Young Bucks and Kenny Omega in 2018. They know instant needle-movers (and what a lightning rod that term will now be for for the foreseeable...) when they see them, even if they don't respect AEW's process enough to realise most of the released wrestlers could probably become big deals eventually down in Jacksonville.

CONT'D...