The Young Bucks On If They Worried Kenny Omega Wouldn't Join AEW

The Young Bucks recently spoke with Brian Fritz for Sporting News about starting All Elite Wrestling and some of the behind-the-scenes decisions that went into creating the promotion.

The Bucks said they were sold on All Elite Wrestling because of the creative freedoms the upstart promotion would provide, with Nick Jackson saying AEW was an easy choice:

“Right off the bat, I would say the freedom, the creative freedom. 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. 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. It feels like it pretty much what we have been doing for the last four or five years but on a bigger scale.”

Matt Jackson added that no matter what the promotion was going to be called, as ‘AEW’ wasn’t always going to be the final name, Tony Khan understood their position and gave them the freedom as artists to hire who they wanted:

“[Tony] basically said ‘Listen, hire who you want to hire and you’re in charge.’ Nobody else can compete with that. A dollar figure can’t compete with that. We’re artists and we’re creative.”

Matt compared the situation to a director putting together his own crew for a project with a studio’s full support, and said no other offer compared to what AEW was giving them.

In regards to Kenny Omega’s signing, The Bucks said they were never concerned that he was going anywhere else. Matt said that while Cody might have needed some convincing due to past startup wrestling companies, Tony Khan knew having The Elite together as a whole was important to the promotion’s vision:

“I’ll tell you this right now: Kenny was the missing piece. 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.”