Caution: the following article contains a spoiler for next week’s taped Christmas special of SmackDown Live
We noted before how NJPW was said to be interested in bringing back Shinsuke Nakamura and later it was reported that his current WWE contract is up in February.
These reports had been a topic of discussion recently and when Nakamura suddenly lost his US title to Rusev during the recent SmackDown tapings, a lot of people started wondering if WWE is preparing for the Japanese Star’s release.
However, if we believe Dave Meltzer of the wrestling observer then this is not the case and when a fan asked about it, Meltzer said that he is staying with the company:
He's not going back to Japan https://t.co/DcL6R6cHC3
— . (@davemeltzerWON) December 19, 2018
With this report, it’s confirmed that the title change wasn’t because of Nakamura’s unconfirmed status and it was likely an effort from the company to freshen things up as they promised.
Now it’d be interesting to see how Rusev’s run with the championship plays out and if he has a long run with the belt or ends up dropping it sometime soon.
