WWE Rumor Roundup: Top star confirms talks with AEW, two RAW Superstars career in jeopardy and more - 16th September 2020

Why WWE shortened the names of Rusev and Cesaro

WWE have cut short the names of several Superstars, but the WWE Universe never really understood the reason behind it. Antonio Cesaro became Cesaro while Alexander Rusev was cut to just Rusev. Most recently, we also saw Buddy Murphy become Murphy.

Dave Meltzer finally had some interesting backstage news on the name changes and claims that they were the decisions of Vince McMahon. He added that the WWE Chairman wanted to ensure that the heels' names were not good enough. He said:

“There was a meeting and at the meeting, Vince goes ‘we gotta drop that first name. If we call him Alexander Rusev, people are gonna start gonna calling him Alex and Alex is not a good name for a heel.’ That’s the real reason so that’s why they dropped the first name. The same thing happened with Cesaro. The reason why they dropped [the name] Antonio Cesaro was because Vince said people are going to start calling him Tony and Tony is not a heel name so we gotta drop the first name.”

Cesaro is still with WWE, while Rusev was released in the mass exodus earlier this year. He is now a part of AEW as Miro.