William Regal Reveals What Went Wrong With His AEW Run

William Regal is once again under the WWE banner. The longtime WWE NXT General Manager spent the bulk of 2022 in All Elite Wrestling, serving as the manager and mouthpiece for the Blackpool Combat Club. Regal's AEW debut came at AEW Revolution where he helped mend fences between Jon Moxley and Bryan Danielson before recruiting Wheeler Yuta to their ranks. Veteran "William Regal Guy" Claudio Castagnoli followed suit in the months after, and by the summer, the Blackpool Combat Club was draped in gold from across both AEW and Ring of Honor.

That said, being a successful on-screen character was never Regal's intent. Speaking on Distraction Pieces Podcast, the gentleman villain noted that he felt his final moments in AEW were too focused on himself.

"In the last months of AEW, it was getting far too much about me. It should have been about the talent I was with, not about me," Regal said (h/t Fightful). "I'm quite happy being in the background. I've had my run. I couldn't have had a better last few months as far as TV and doing that, but I didn't go there with that intention. The intention was to do something different, and it started off the way it did, but I didn't expect it to end up being this thing that it was for the last seven months where I just became talent. I went there with a different plan because I was asked to go there to help out in a different capacity, and that never transpired."

Regal's WWE return comes with the caveat that he cannot appear on television until 2024, a move that he is quite comfortable with. 

"There is a lot that happened [in 2022] and a lot of things that made me go, 'I'm quite happy being not in the limelight,'" Regal continued. "I had a nice little gig with NXT for a long time where I just showed up occasionally. Then in the pandemic, I was used a lot more because we had to go into survival mode and there were certain characters and it changed things a little bit. I said, 'Don't use me as much, if you don't mind. It should be about the talent, not about me.' This (interview) will be the last thing I'm doing. Unless WWE asks me to do something as myself, I'm doing nothing else about anything or wrestling for at least a year. I'm happy with that."

Regal now serves as WWE Vice President of Global Talent Relations.