As noted earlier, Luke Gallows and Karl Anderson have signed 5-year deals so they will stay with WWE at least through 2024. Their current deals were going to expire in September and WWE offered them more money to keep them from jumping to All Elite Wrestling.
“They’re signed,” Dave Meltzer said about Gallows and Anderson on Friday’s Wrestling Observer Radio. He added, “WWE is making even bigger offers than people think and that was one of them. They don’t want to lose anyone. No one’s getting fired unless they have to.”
He added that anyone who gets fired from WWE would only be because of disciplinary reasons.
Meltzer added, “WWE does not want to lose anyone right now. No one has told me this but knowing Vince, [I think] they are going to do a counter for [AEW weekly TV].”
It’s looking like Wednesday night from 8-10 pm Eastern will be when the weekly show will air on TNT and it would compete with the first hour of NXT. It would not shock me if WWE worked out a deal with FS1 to air NXT live every week as counter-programming to AEW.
A WWE source told me that the money that Gallows and Anderson will be getting from WWE is significantly more than the $500,000/year they each turned down a couple of months ago. The same source noted that if they will be multi-millionaires by the end of the next contract and they will be getting main event level money. Of course, this raises the pay scale for main eventers and they will be getting even higher offers when their contracts are about to expire.
There are other wrestlers that are considering leaving and it’s expected that they will get similar offers to stay. The Revival have yet to sign new deals but WWE has plenty of time to convince them to stay because their contracts don’t expire until early 2020.
It’s clear that AEW is a concern for WWE as changes are being made behind-the-scenes to improve ratings and change the perception that WWE is the uncool wrestling company. A couple of weeks ago, we asked Stephanie McMahon about AEW competing with WWE. Click below to hear what she had to say about AEW.
