Kenny Omega: The Best Choice That I Could Make Was Having Will Ospreay Be The Next Guy

Making Will Ospreay ‘the next guy’ was the best choice to make in Omega’s mind.

There’s a new interview with Kenny Omega that was conducted by The Anime Effect Podcast. After Omega’s AEW World Championship loss to Will Ospreay at All In 2026, he sent out a tweet that read, ‘The rest is up to you, Will.’

Omega was asked to elaborate on that. He opened up about the conversation he had with Ospreay after the match.

“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.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Omega spoke candidly about the doubts and concerns he had going into the main event of All In. Those comments can be read here.

If the quote in this article is used, please credit The Anime Effect Podcast with an H/T to Fightful for the transcription.