With the NXT Europe brand being announced, Oku wonders why NXT UK talents were let go.
Michael Oku is coming off of a weekend that saw him compete in PWG’s Battle of Los Angeles tournament and on night two, he was a part of a 10-man tag against AEW’s Jericho Appreciation Society (Chris Jericho, Daniel Garcia, Matt Menard, Angelo Parker & Sammy Guevara).
To talk about that experience, he sat down with Stephanie Chase for an interview. Also during their chat, Oku expressed his thoughts about the announcement of WWE’s NXT Europe brand after NXT UK disbanded.
He started off by sharing his opinion that NXT UK was not designed to help the U.K. indies but rather to hurt it. He questioned the intentions of NXT Europe and why NXT UK talents were released. Oku closed by saying he does not want to make it out to be this evil thing because NXT UK took care of a lot of wrestlers.
It feels like NXT UK was created not to help, but to hurt and I think the biggest bit of evidence on that is when there was nothing to compete with anymore and when there is a pandemic and when they’re not making money from it, their immediate thing is to get rid of it and again, they say, ‘We’re gonna do NXT Europe.’ Okay, okay. If you are, what’s the explanation for firing all of your roster? That’s what I wanna know. That’s the one thing that they would love to know, the ones that got let go.
It was a few of them that were asked to do promotion for it [Clash at the Castle]. They were asked by the company to help promote it and then they get let go so, there’s a lot of reasons — a lot of the things that they have done, I feel, in my opinion, kind of give away what the true intentions of ‘our brand’ was. But, when it got disbanded, when it got closed down, you really just did validate what we’ve been doing on the scene at the moment. Again, especially RevPro, because I know a lot of people, if you wrestle there, they’ll be looking for you and they’ll be trying to get you.
What happens next with NXT Europe if it’s a thing? The running joke was that now that [William] Regal is back in the company — once Triple H is in charge and brought Regal back, it’s like, oh, it’s definitely now a thing. Before, we’re like, it’s not a thing but now it definitely is. But then, the new joke is that because Vince [McMahon] is now back in the Board of Directors, it’s not a thing anymore. So we’ll have to wait and see… I don’t wanna to just call it 100 percent this evil thing because it did provide wrestlers, independent wrestlers with more money than they would have got if they were independent wrestlers but again, we’ll see what they do. We’ll see if they realize that Europe is not a country and it’s like a load of different countries, there’s different laws and see if they can bring people around. It’s intriguing. I’m intrigued to say the least.
Oku is a regular for Revolution Pro Wrestling and has wrestled there for a great portion of his career. He stated that if he were to ever sign a contract in pro wrestling, one condition is that he must be allowed to work RevPro shows.
Zack Sabre Jr., he said he’s back at the last RevPro show so, if we get more Zack Sabre Jr., that’s cool and if we can have Will Ospreay doing some more of the big shows or whatever show he can, that’s wonderful and then, sometimes I think — obviously selfishly, 100 percent selfishly, I wanna raise my star power for myself for my own career but I also see that as if I can do that, then that will help put more eyes on the U.K. scene and on the RevPros and such and so on and so forth and wherever I wrestle or whoever I wrestle, it puts eyes on them, because that’s what I want too as well. I don’t want to just be successful, take everything for myself, be greedy and leave. I want to see how much I can still help out with the scene. If I ever get signed to anyone, the condition would be that I could still wrestle for RevPro, that’s the condition, no matter where it is. For sure.
Michael Oku guest appeared on the POST Wrestling Daily Update in 2022 and to get a look at that, click here.
If the quotes in this article are used, please credit Stephanie Chase with an H/T to POST Wrestling for the transcriptions.
