William Regal talked about the state of UK Wrestling and NXT UK on the latest “Gentleman Villain” podcast.
Regal said, “I know that it’s been over 10 years that NXT UK was in the thought process. I suppose I can say this. I also know for the last several years the NXT Europe was in process. I’m gonna leave it there. But things changed in the last year and different things. But now, things are changing again, and things are back on track. So I’m not going to say any more about that. But for any of these people who seem to think that they know what is going on, they don’t know. But I know and they don’t. They know what they’re getting told. And I know different, and I don’t know anything anymore because I don’t work there and I don’t ask. But I know that the expansion of NXT was going to happen. We’ve been working, I was personally working on that for the last seven or eight years until January. I know what I know and I’m not going to say what I know.”
“Whatever happened and whatever nonsense you think about whatever NXT UK was, NXT was a good, safe place for people to work. They got paid a weekly wage check which they never normally got. They didn’t get taken advantage of by promoters promising or holding certain things over them that promoters do. There’s people that will say, ‘Well, you killed British wrestling.’ Mate. I’m telling you, I went over there in 2016 for two weeks to check out the British wrestling scene and I found that it wasn’t what it was supposed to be. ICW was running a few shows a month. Progress was running one or two shows a month. Rev Pro was running one and sometimes two shows a month. I ended up going to All Star promotion shows just because I felt bad about not having enough shows to go to.”
“It was a myth that there was all this incredible stuff going on, when really there were companies running a couple of shows a month. But because they were on the internet, blowing their own horn and getting themselves put over in whatever form they could get put over, that there was a booming wrestling scene. Whereas when I actually met Pete Dunn and talked to him, he was working at a little working men’s club in England because he was one of them that went out and got work off a small promotion. The truth of it is Brian Dixon of All Star promotions, which is the person I used to work for, was running more shows than anybody, and because he doesn’t go on the internet and doesn’t care about any of that, he was still the most successful, and was the most successful promoter in British history.”
“It was cobbled together and everybody was blowing their own horn about what they were doing. I know all the people from Progress and ICW, but okay, you’re selling out one show in Camden, 700 people or 800 people once a month. When I used to work there, working in the winter, I was working 20 shows a month. So all these people that buy into all this nonsense are buying into nonsense. There was PCW doing a couple of shows a month. There were companies doing shows a few shows a month and it was looking like there was a lot going on, and there was a lot going on for the wrestlers who were booked on all these shows. But for the majority of normal wrestlers it wasn’t what it was cracked up to be.”
