Michael Oku recently spoke with Stephanie Chase for an in-depth interview covering all things pro wrestling.
During the discussion, the British wrestling star and Revolution Pro veteran spoke about how he feels WWE only created NXT UK to hurt the United Kingdom wrestling scene.
Featured below are some of the highlights.
On how he thinks NXT UK was created to hurt the UK scene, explaining that WWE pulled the plug on the brand as soon as it stopped making money during the pandemic: “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.”
On Revolution Pro and how he would still love to work for them even if he signed with a bigger company: “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.”
Check out the complete Michael Oku interview via the YouTube player embedded below. H/T to POST Wrestling for transcribing the above quotes.
