AEW is typically good about giving fans what they want to see, but it was right to hold off on the rematch between FTR and the Young Bucks for the time being. When Matt and Nick Jackson won the AEW tag-team titles on the June 15 episode of Wednesday Night Dynamite, audiences immediately assumed that they were being set up to face FTR. FTR, after all, was fresh off of winning the IWPG Tag-Team Titles at the Forbidden Door pay-per-view, and a clash for four sets of tag championships was tantalizing.
That was never in the cards, though, and the team of Keith Lee and Swerve Strickland shocked the World by winning a triple-threat match for the AEW Tag-Team titles on the July 13 episode of Dynamite. This was a bit of a swerve for two reasons. For starters, a split between Strickland and Lee has been teased over the last few months. And secondly, fans were eager to see FTR and the Young Bucks lock horns in a historic match featuring four sets of major tag titles. A report by Dave Meltzer indicates that this was never the plan, however, and All Elite pumping the breaks on this mega match was the right call to make.
Wrestling fans like to knock WWE for using the "Once In A Lifetime" line only to go back on it less than a year later. They are in the process of repeating history in the build to this year's SummerSlam event, after all. Brock Lesnar vs Roman Reigns is being billed as their last fight, but backstage news already indicates that it's a well that Vince McMahon would go back to in a pinch. AEW can't start testing the trust of fans in a similar way. FTR vs Young Bucks for all those championships would almost have to be billed as a once-in-a-lifetime bout, and those two teams simply have more stories to tell in the coming years before getting to a blowoff match of that magnitude.
AEW Can Use Long-Term Storytelling For FTR vs Young Bucks
Tony Khan doesn't get all of his booking decisions right—no one does—but when he devotes time to a story, long term, he sticks with it. Think back to Hangman Adam Page's build to AEW World Champion, for example. Almost to a fault, when AEW commits to getting to a certain place, it does what it has to do to get there. It's impossible that FTR vs Young Bucks won't happen again at some juncture, but doing it at All Out on September 4 would be jumping the shark a bit.
It would be a match for four tag-team titles, so a build that would work for a normal main-event caliber match wouldn't fit here. The next time FTR and the Young Bucks touch, it should be with AEW as the focus. Not ROH and IWGP and AAA and AEW, almost as an afterthought. That fight will be for the title of the best tag team in AEW's short history, and it should take fans a while to get there. Just enjoy the ride.