It will be interesting to follow Malakai Black’s next move because, as he stated in his statement on Sunday, we have not seen the last of him yet. According to a report from Fightful from the previous week, Black was granted a conditional release from AEW; therefore, it would appear that he does not intend to work for Tony Khan again.
Dave Meltzer and Bryan Alvarez discussed the situation involving Malakai Black on Wrestling Observer Radio, and Meltzer mentioned that Black expressed interest in returning to WWE.
“He wrestled last night, which is interesting,” Meltzer said. “Then he put out a statement today and he wanted out from AEW. I guess we’ll see what happened. Obviously, he wanted to go back to WWE and he had a lot of time left on his deal. I think 4 and a half years left on the deal. It’s an interesting thing because it’s really difficult to keep someone who is unhappy under contract for that length of time. He did sign for that length of time. The reason you sign people to contracts is so that they can’t it they get unhappy or somebody makes an offer somewhere else, they can’t just go the next day. The whole reason he was signed to a 5-year big money contract was so if something happened in WWE and they wanted him back and they changed his mind, that they had him and they could book him for all those years. So it becomes an interesting situation and the same goes in the other direction too.”
There is no evidence to suggest that Black has received an offer to return to WWE, but there have been multiple reports that WWE has allegedly reached out to talent that is under contract with AEW. The names of individuals that WWE is interested in are those that have previously worked for Triple H in NXT.
Meltzer mentioned how the WWE had fired some people ahead of schedule in the past (such as Dustin Rhodes and Shawn Spears), but in the majority of cases, they make the wrestlers wait until their contracts are up before firing them.
Meltzer mentioned that Black has been dealing with an injury, which is why he hasn’t been used as much recently. He said, “he had a push there and he was hurt, which was part of the problem. I think he had a bad back and so he was used not as much as late. They put him in the Trios thing so the other two guys…it’s a lot easier with an injury to be in a Trio rather than being used as a singles guy a lot. I guess we have to wait for it to play out and see what the situation is. Basically, it’s what type of a deal he and Tony Khan came up with. Tony Khan wouldn’t talk about it. He talked a lot but didn’t say any specifics as to what the deal is. The story going around was that it was a conditional release and what that meant, I don’t really know. The assumption of a conditional release is that it’s probably something where he can’t just go right to WWE. Maybe there’s a timeframe or something like that. I don’t think he would agree to it if the timeframe was four and a half years.”
(h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription)
