Backstage Update on WWE’s Recent Round of Roster Cuts & Reason For The Large Amount of Cuts Compared To 2025

As noted before, Kairi Sane, Aleister Black, the entire Wyatt Sicks, the Motor City Machine Guns, and Santos Escobar were released from WWE this past April as part of a larger batch of talent releases and departures. New Day’s Xavier Woods & Kofi Kingston and The MFTs’ JC Mateo & Tonga Loa also recently departed from WWE with New Day’s departure being due to a mutual decision from both sides over them not accepting a new restructured deal offer to stay in the company.

Dave Meltzer reported in a recent episode of the Wrestling Observer Radio that his sources stated that one reason why there were more roster cuts this year compared to last year was due to TKO officials felt that they were too new as WWE’s ownership group and did not want to look like as being “bad guys” to the locker room. Meltzer reported that TKO officials made the decision to hold back on the amount of releases at the time and this year’s large size of cuts is “kind of like a catch-up.”

In regards to the main roster cuts, Meltzer reported that TKO officials reportedly went to WWE creative and requested to have a similar amount of people on the main roster being cut as were being called up from the NXT brand for this year. WWE Creative reportedly were the ones who made the actual decisions on who would get cut based on who they were not planning on using.

Another reason for the large size of roster cuts reportedly was due to WWE SmackDown’s upcoming move back to being a weekly two-hour show on USA Network. Meltzer reported that WWE having one less hour of television time means there is less time to put as many people on for shows resulting in the additional cuts made on the SmackDown side of the roster.

Meltzer also reported that those spoken to stated that WWE has finished their latest round of roster cuts and everyone who is going to be cut has been noticed but this does not mean that all of the names have become public yet.