TNA World Champion Mike Santana’s contract expires sometime in July, per PWInsider, and WWE has shown interest in him before.
Santana is a two-time TNA World Champion, currently in his second reign. He got his start in 2007, working the New York and New Jersey indies before signing with what was then Impact Wrestling in 2017. Teamed with Ortiz as LAX, he won the Impact World Tag Team Titles multiple times — the two still hold the record for most combined days as champions, at 662.
Santana and Ortiz jumped to AEW in 2019 as part of Chris Jericho’s Inner Circle. After Jericho and Hager turned on the stable, the two aligned with Eddie Kingston. Santana left in 2024 and went back to TNA.
That contract timing puts him in the same free agent conversation as Leon Slater. In the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, Dave Meltzer reported that the belief inside the business is that Slater is gone — WWE or AEW — once his deal is up.
Matt Hardy got into TNA’s place in the pecking order on his podcast, The Extreme Life of Matt Hardy, comparing the company to ECW in the late ’90s. The thinking: TNA sits third behind WWE and AEW, and the two bigger players can usually outbid it for established names heading into free agency.
Right now, Santana sits on top of the card as champion. TNA hasn’t commented on his contract, and Santana hasn’t said anything publicly either.
