AEW Wanted To Sign Swerve Strickland Back In 2019

Tony Khan has been a longtime admirer of Swerve Strickland and he wanted to bring the former Killshot to All Elite Wrestling when the promotion launched in 2019. 

"After his first match against Tony Nese on AEW Rampage, Chris Jericho walked back to me and said, 'This guy is really amazing. Where did you find him?' I've been watching him for years. I wanted to bring him into AEW when we first launched, but he had just been signed by WWE. Swerve is a wildcard. We saw that Swerve is a breakout star. He won the tag team championship in his first year and went on to have a massive 2023 while being showcased as a singles star. The idea was to showcase Swerve in feature positions with the intent and belief that crowds all over the world would buy into him. I believed he'd become very popular," Khan told The Athletic.

Strickland is set to challenge for the AEW World Championship at Revolution on Sunday, March 3. Obviously, Swerve is hoping to win that match and carry the belt into All In.

"I want to come to Wembley Stadium this year as the world champion, as an African American in another country and fill 80,000 seats. Speaking about the possibility of pulling that off, it gives me goosebumps. It's hard not to be excited about this kind of thing," Swerve said.

Strickland signed with All Elite Wrestling in March 2022, debuting at that year's Revolution pay-per-view. Strickland became a free agent following his WWE release but Triple H did try and re-sign the former NXT North American Champion after he was appointed WWE Chief Content Officer. Strickland didn't even answer the phone when WWE called.