Wade Barrett Says He Always Planned To Return To Commentary Once His In-Ring Days Were Over

Wade Barrett talks about doing commentary on WWE programming.

Currently, Wade Barrett works as a color commentator on WWE SmackDown. He retired from in-ring competition back in 2016.

During an interview with Fightful’s Sean Ross Sapp, Wade Barrett spoke about becoming a commentator in WWE. Barrett states that it was Dusty Rhodes’ idea for him to join the broadcasting team.

“Yeah, so most people were not aware of Wade Barrett until 2010 when NXT season one started and Nexus happened, and then people were like, ‘Who is this guy?’ Because we didn’t put any spotlight on the developmental system of its day, which for me was OVW followed by FCW. Now there was a point in FCW, probably in 2008 / 2009, where my boss at the time, Dusty Rhodes, decided, ‘Hey, Wade, I like the way you cut promos. I want to put you as the commentator for the TV shows.’”

Initially, Barrett did commentary for FCW until WWE started using him more frequently as a wrestler. But he knew what he wanted to do once his in-ring career was over.

“So we did a weekly TV show, like you see with NXT these days, but it was just broadcast on a very small network in Florida. So we had a viewership, probably, of 10,000 people tops. The rest of the world was not party to this, no one was paying attention, but I was the commentator for probably six months for the FCW shows. So WWE came down at that point, said, ‘Hey, Wade, we really like what you’re doing on commentary, but we want you as a wrestler. We want to pull you off the desk, put you back in the ring.’ Then a few months later my career in-ring took off on the main show. So I always had that in my back pocket, I always knew when the in-ring days were done, I’m gonna want to get back and do that commentary stuff. Thankfully I got the opportunity to do just that.”

Elsewhere in the same interview, Barrett talked about being on commentary for WWE 2K26. Fans can read his full comments here.

Fans can also watch the full interview in the YouTube embed linked at the top of this article.