Is Cesaro moving from Monday Night Raw to SmackDown Live? (WWE.com)
The WWE may be cooking up a storyline in which Cesaro switches allegiances from Monday Night Raw to SmackDown Live.
On Monday Night Raw this week, Cesaro was frustrated by General Manager Mick Foley’s decision to place him in a tag team with Sheamus, failing to really resolve their weeks-long feud. As the show was airing, SmackDown Live General Manger Daniel Bryan reached out to Cesaro on Twitter, saying that he should come over to the blue brand if he’s frustrated with Raw.
Dear @WWECesaro, when does your Raw contract end? We’d love to have you on #SmackdownLive :)
Cesaro seemed interested, responding to Bryan by saying that he’d find out when his Raw contract is up. He also expressed frustration with the fact that he has to team up with Sheamus and that their best-of-seven series ended this way.
A potential Cesaro swap was teased a few weeks ago when Daniel Bryan told Cesaro that he feels his talents are not being utilized on Monday Night Raw. Daily Wrestling News reported at the time the rumor that Cesaro’s storyline was leading up to a trade to SmackDown Live.
Plus, immediately after the 2016 draft, Cesaro went on a rant about Raw and its management.
“I think Raw going forward needs to be about the superstars,” he said. “It needs to be about the performers in the ring and not about how Stephanie and Mick Foley coexist. They need to be there to mediate and make the best show, but that does not need to be the focus. The focus should be on the superstars who got drafted.”
Cesaro also said at the time that he feels he would be a better fit for SmackDown Live.
There were rumblings ever since the brand extension started that superstars could be traded between the shows. We saw a less significant instance of this a few weeks ago when Jack Swagger jumped ship from Raw and headed to SmackDown after his contract expired. Though Swagger is not as important a player as Cesaro is right now, that plot development established that this kind of switch is possible.
We don’t know much about the details of Cesaro’s contract, but it is believed that it expires sometime before the end of 2016.
Cesaro has received a lot of praise in the last few days for his performance at the Clash of Champions pay-per-view. In the final match of his best-of-seven series with Sheamus, Cesaro performed a suicide dive and landed on his neck in a shocking moment that left many convinced he must have been seriously injured. Fortunately, that did not end up being the case, although he said his neck was in pain.
