Triple H says he realized there was a wealth of talent in the United Kingdom and wanted to help expose that talent to a global audience.
It's been a little over three years since the birth of the NXT UK brand with the inaugural United Kingdom Championship tournament. With that tournament, the WWE Universe was introduced to names like Pete Dunne and Tyler Bate and they have largely been viewed as favorites ever since.
Speaking with Inside The Ropes, Triple H reflected on making the decision to expand the NXT brand into the United Kingdom.
“There is a wealth of talent here that have built something really cool here. And through their hard work and through their determination and, you know, kind of learning on their own have built their own thing here,” he began. “To come here and now, to I guess in some way reward them for that hard work and start to create something bigger for them and start to create a pathway that leads them to something more. And we talked about last night, right. This is about being able to make this a career and a longterm career choice for them and to be able to expand that out so it can be on every level for them and for everybody else and see that that pathway is there to something bigger.”
Shawn Michaels, NXT head trainer and somebody Triple H has gone on record as saying has taken the NXT UK brand under his wing, would remark that sometimes It is a matter of a lack of exposure and awareness of a certain scene that can cause some talents to go under the radar.
In response to this, Triple H would say that the formation of the NXT UK brand was similar to putting together the Mae Young Classic tournament in that you can quickly go from thinking you won't be able to find enough talent to fulfill your vision to being overwhelmed with the amount of talent that is actually available.
“It's funny that when you start to dig into it, to Shawn's point about it not having that exposure, so you're not aware of it, even as aware of the environment globally as we are," Hunter said. "When we went to go do the Mae Young Classic, the first time and we started to say, 'we're gonna do this tournament with women, there's enough women out there for us to do this and we started to go, 'we'll do 16. Finding sixteen elite women of the caliber that we want to be in this will be a challenge.’”
He continued, “Then, we started to dig and we started to find more and more. Next thing you know we're at 32 and next thing you know, to have 32 women in the tournament. I'm going, 'who am I going to put in there? Who am I not going to put in there?' You know, that became the bigger question. We're going to do it again here soon. That's we're kind of getting to that point again now like, wow, there's just a lot out there. So, you know, they're here and they're all over the place but I think the talent sort of gravitates towards finding each other and they end up in these little pockets and then they're all learning from each other. Helping to bring that out and show to the rest of the world is the goal.”
Currently, the status of NXT UK is up in the air due to the Coronavirus pandemic. The planned NXT UK TakeOver event which was set for Dublin, Ireland in late April has been postponed until October.
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