After months of speculation, former IWGP Heavyweight Champion Kenny Omega officially signed with All Elite Wrestling to work as both an in-ring competitor and an executive vice president.
Videos by ComicBook.com
The signing was a major grab for the company given Omega’s ties to The Elite faction, his popularity among independent wrestling fans and his potential value as a new signing for AEW’s main competition in the WWE.
But, as they explained in a new interview with Sporting News, Matt and Nick Jackson (The Young Bucks) never expected Omega to sign with Vince McMahon.
“Nah, we knew the whole time,” Matt said when asked if he was ever concerned about Omega not joining the new promotion.
“I’ll tell you this right now: Kenny was the missing piece,” Nick added. “I talked earlier about how Tony called me originally and got on the phone with him and he told me we need Kenny. We need The Elite. I need the best wrestler in the world and I need the best tag team in the world. That was it. Originally, it started as the three of us and then Cody later came on board. We kind of had to sell him on it because, in wresting, and he’s probably heard a million stories about startups and billionaires investing in wrestling and we all have. We finally, the three of us, got him on board and once he was on board, he was all in and here we are.”
In an interview with Dave Meltzer shortly after the signing, Omega discussed his negotiations with WWE on a potential deal.
“The most surprising thing to me was just how accommodating and how cool it was to discuss, you know, future with WWE,” Omega said. “I didn’t think they’d ever be in the running. I was like ‘yeah, I’ll hear you guys out’ but I didn’t think it’d be good because everyone was telling me, well, what to expect. I have nothing but great things to say about them.”
Shortly after announcing his own signing at an AEW fan rally, Omega was booked for the May 25 Double or Nothing show at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas Nevada. He’s set to take on Chris Jericho in a rematch from Wrestle Kingdom 12.
Elsewhere in the interview, the Jacksons described their own though process in chossing AEW over WWE.
“It was an outlet for us to express the way we feel pro wrestling should be done, the way we think it should be done in 2019 and the future,” Nick said. “It was pretty easy from there on out. We were like ‘OK, we can should the world how we feel wrestling should be represented and this is how we feel like it should be.’ The other options were to stay where we were or go to WWE. For me, personally, I feel like this was the easy choice because we’re going to be with all of our friends and we’re having a good time.”
