The calendar is ticking. As loyal as some fans can get to wrestlers, there’s no guarantee that they’re going to be sticking with their current company. Wrestling is a business and there is always the chance that someone could leave once their contract is up. This happened constantly during the Monday Night Wars with wrestlers jumping from one company to another and it may be happening again early next year.
According to Dave Meltzer on Wrestling Observer Radio, the contracts of AJ Styles, Shinsuke Nakamura, Luke Gallows and Karl Anderson are all set to expire in early 2019 with Nakamura’s expiring in January. The four all jumped to WWE from New Japan around the same time in 2016. There is currently no word on if the four of them will be re-signing with WWE or not, though New Japan is interested in bringing Nakamura back due to his higher profile status and their expansion plans.
This should be enough to make you want Styles to stay.
Who will Styles be facing at Summerslam? Find out here.
Opinion: I can’t imagine Styles leaving WWE at the moment. He’s the WWE Champion and is one of the featured attractions in WWE. If he can still go physically (which he can), WWE would be fairly insane to even consider letting him go. Anderson and Gallows aren’t doing anything in WWE, but if you can get that kind of pay for not a lot of work, why would you want to leave? Then there’s Nakamura, who has been successful in WWE but still a disappointment overall. I don’t know if he wants to leave, but he would be the least surprising.
Do you think any of these four will leave? Do you want them to stay? Let us know in the comments below.
Thomas Hall has been a wrestling fan for over thirty years and has seen over 50,000 wrestling matches. He has also been a wrestling reviewer since 2009 with over 5,000 full shows covered. You can find his work at kbwrestlingreviews.com, or check out his Amazon author page with 28 wrestling books. His latest book is the the Complete 2003 Monday Night Raw Reviews.
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