The 25-month ghost of AEW television

For those of you who haven't spent the last two years scrubbing through every Cagematch rating, Matt Sydal has been MIA since the spring of 2024. Now, according to reports like those from F4WOnline, the brass at AEW is finally looking at bringing him back into the fold.

Bringing back a guy who hasn't been on active duty for over two years is a bold strategy in a company that already has a roster size rivaling the population of a small midwestern town. Sydal is technically sound, obviously, but you have to wonder where he fits in a television product that currently struggles to find enough minutes for its own active champions.

The JoJo factor and the AEW All In tease

While the front office is figuring out the Sydal situation, we have the lingering question of JoJo Offerman. Following her appearance at All In Texas, she has been dropping hints about further business with the promotion, as noted by Ringside News.

Adding a veteran ring announcer or personality is one thing, but adding them to a show that sometimes feels like it has three different directions at once is another. AEW has a tendency to hoard talent like a dragon sitting on gold coins, only to leave those coins scattered in a dark corner of a website profile page.

Booking into a corner

The math here is simple and it doesn't look great for the talent involved. If you bring back Sydal, who are you bumping from the card? Are we sacrificing a 15-minute showcase match between two hungry younger talents just to have a legend perform a textbook shooting star press for a pop?

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a clean execution as much as anyone, but the reporting on this potential return highlights a chronic issue. Management seems obsessed with moving backward rather than forward. If this return is just another "hey look who is back" moment, it will burn out by the third commercial break.

The reality of internal competition

We saw this before with the mass signings of 2021 and 2022. You end up with guys like Sydal and others stuck in a creative purgatory where they might show up once a month on a pay-per-view pre-show or a random episode of Collision. That isn't a return; that is a holding pattern.

If they bring him back on a full-time contract, he needs a purpose. He needs a feud that actually matters. If he comes back just to lose twice and then vanish again, it is a waste of everyone's time, including the guy who is nursing the injury that kept him out for 25 months.

The bottom line

AEW is at an inflection point. They have the budget and the talent base, but the focus is scattering like a crowd at a bad indie show. If they want to stop the hemorrhaging of viewer interest, they need to stop treating roster management like a game of fantasy wrestling and start booking like they have a vision for the next six months.

I hope Sydal comes back and kills it. I hope he works a program that makes sense and elevates the person he works with, even if that person is 20 years younger than him. But let's be real: until I see a coherent path on television, this sits at a 3 out of 10 on the excitement scale.