Top WWE Champion Pulls Out Of TV Tapings

If you watched last week’s episode of SmackDown, you’ll have seen that Daniel Bryan was attacked at ringside by Cesaro and Shinsuke Nakamura, who then stood tall alongside Baron Corbin, because heels.

A notable absence from this segment was that of Intercontinental Champion Sami Zayn, who was nowhere to be seen throughout the episode.

According to Dave Meltzer in the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, the reason for this is that Zayn has decided he doesn’t want to wrestle during the pandemic, something WWE has reportedly told staff it is perfectly fine to do.

It is likely that we have only heard of a handful of the people who haven’t wanted to wrestle, as many may simply not be on TV enough for us to notice. The skeleton crew WWE sends to shows has included a lot of Performance Center and NXT stars as of late, which would appear to suggest that WWE has very few wrestlers actually wanting to wrestle at this time.

You will have noticed that on the past few episodes of Raw and SmackDown, the same people have been used for multiple segments throughout the show, which would seem to suggest the promotion doesn’t have enough willing stars to fill out 3 hours on a Monday or 2 hours on a Friday.

If you were a WWE star, would you have pulled out? Let us know in the comments on Twitter.

• Sami Zayn
• performance center
• Smackdown
• wwe

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