Bryan Danielson: I Came To AEW With The Idea To Wrestle Kenny Omega Right Away

Bryan Danielson didn’t want to waste any time with his AEW career. 

He will make his AEW debut on Wednesday at AEW Dynamite Grand Slam when he faces AEW World Champion Kenny Omega. Though the match is a non-title affair, it is a dream match for many fans and Danielson was more than happy to give the fans what they wanted right out of the gate. 

“This is kind of one of my ideas I came in with is doing this right away. The idea came from when I came back from my retirement (in 2018) there were a lot of matches in WWE people wanted to see and we either took a long time to get to them or even didn’t get to them at all and I think we lost some of the momentum when fans were excited about me coming back from my retirement. And at the time I felt yeah, build to these matches, build to these matches. I think with so many exciting people coming into AEW  you can build to a CM Punk-Kenny Omega match. You can build to some of those matches, but I also think fans want to see something right away to get them super excited. To be fair, I want my first match in AEW to feel like a big deal. So there is no bigger deal than me versus Kenny Omega right now,” Danielson told Joseph Staszewski of the New York Post.

He continued by saying, “I have also been looking forward to wrestling Kenny for years. As I was in WWE I thought it was a match that actually would never happen. But when Kenny and I wrestled before he didn’t have that much of a name on the independent scene and hadn’t done all the stuff he did in Japan. As that was happening and I was in WWE I was like, ‘Woah, I would love to wrestle this guy.'”

Danielson and Omega previously wrestled at PWG One Hundred in 2009 in a match that took on more comedy than serious wrestling. 

Fightful will have live coverage of AEW Dynamite Grand Slam beginning at 8 p.m. ET on Wednesday.