Kenny Omega believes he made the right call in choosing Will Ospreay as AEW’s next top star and seems completely at ease with his recent AEW World Championship loss.
Ospreay defeated Omega in the main event of All In at Wembley Stadium, winning the AEW World Championship for the first time in his career.
Speaking on The Anime Effect, Omega explained that the phrase “it’s all up to you now,” which he told Ospreay, carried a much deeper meaning. The former champion acknowledged that he can no longer keep up a champion’s schedule and said he chose Ospreay to take on that role.
“So I do feel that there’s certain phrases and meanings to words that you can say, even if it’s pulled directly from a movie, from an anime; it has meaning. It has profound meaning, and when I had told Will (Ospreay), like, ‘Hey, it’s all up to you now,’ there’s more to that. We had a bit of a conversation, and I actually said to him, ‘It’s up to you now,’ and I added the part of, ‘I don’t know if I can do it anymore,’ and it’s not that I can’t do it. It’s can I just not do it at the volume that the fans expect me to do it? Like All Might, gonna tie it back to that, the amount of times he can use his powers becomes smaller and smaller and smaller and I always feel the expectation of the people and they deserve to have the best show in town.”
“They really do. If we have a champion, you know, that can beat me, if we have someone that the fans have adulation for, have an admiration for, cheer for him or her, that’s something special and that’s something that needs to be protected, I believe. Because it’s so hard to find new stars, and when you do, you have to make sure that you’re gonna give them an environment where they can thrive, and so my goal, and knowing how hungry Ospreay was after coming back from a very scary surgery — you can tell how hungry he is. He has his house still in the U.K. but he still wants to be on every single show, and even if he had a match, the next day — the biggest match of his career at Wembley — he was still grinding it out on a local indie the day before… I can’t do that schedule anymore.”
“I just can’t do it, and I do feel that if there is a champion and someone who can beat me in the ring, if there’s someone like that out there and I sort of had made my mental choice that it’s gonna be Will Ospreay, I wanna make sure that they can not only have the greatest of performances but they can capture the fans’ imaginations and they could have them cheer for them, more so by just the sheer heart that you possess in your performances but also, just by the volume of workload. I want as many cities and as many countries to see Will Ospreay as champion as possible. In that moment, absolutely, that was the best choice that I could make was having Will be the next guy. I don’t know if you wanna call it a passing of the torch, but certainly, I don’t feel like I’m disappointed for losing the belt. I feel the opposite. I feel like I lost it to someone who is just, at this point in his career, hungrier than me, and someone who can take up the schedule that the fans deserve for their main event champion to have.”
As the new champion, Ospreay already has Jon Moxley confirmed as his next challenger at All Out in Chicago. After All In, he also said his series with Omega is tied at 2-2 and left the door open for a fifth match.