Daniel Bryan gives his honest thoughts on part-timers in WWE

Published Jan. 4, 2017 1:09 p.m. ET

Nick Schwartz

AJ Styles derided John Cena in an excellent promo on SmackDown Tuesday ahead of their Royal Rumble title match for turning into a part-timer years after he criticized The Rock for doing the same thing.

While Styles vs. Cena should be the most anticipated match on the card, WWE has also been heavily promoting the returns Goldberg and Brock Lesnar, who just recently main-evented Survivor Series, and it's expected that both of those stars will have huge matches a few months later at WrestleMania 33.

SmackDown GM Daniel Bryan opened up on why some stars on the WWE main roster may not exactly be thrilled that a 50-year-old Goldberg and an unabashed mercenary like Lesnar are receiving top billing for one of the biggest shows of the year in a revealing segment on Talking Smack.

“Here’s the issue, and I had this issue when I was a full-time wrestler, and I still kind of have this issue today.

When you’re somebody like, for example, Dean Ambrose…. so Dean Ambrose, since the Draft, has - all of our live events, all of the live events that we run for SmackDown that aren’t televised - who has been main eventing probably 99 percent of those live events? Dean Ambrose.

But then every year, around WrestleMania time, all these people who are ‘part-timers’ come in and they take the best spots at WrestleMania. And as a talent, you’re sitting there like ‘wait a second, I’m the guy… I’ve been on the road.’ In 2013, I did 227 matches. Ambrose has been the guy whose had the most matches for the last two years. Everybody who did it before him got injured the next year.

He’s the guy who, since he started, he hasn’t missed a match, he hasn’t missed a show, he’s there every single week. So when you see these people who do two or three matches a year, or they come in and then they take four months off…. With John Cena, I get it. He’s been in this game for a long time and he’s worked harder than anybody else.

But when you hear people have this anger against part-timers, that’s where it’s coming from. From a management perspective, now I’m starting to look at it from a different view as like ‘OK, we want these big events.’ And sometimes you need big attractions and this and that. But I also, I mix that with like, ‘hey, we need to put it on our full-time guys.’”