There was some online chatter earlier this year that AJ Styles had spoken to AEW about the possibility of leaving WWE and joining the fledgling company back in 2019, and it looks like that's now been confirmed. In fact, it sounds like the Phenomenal One came very close to signing on the dotted line.
While appearing on The Good Brothers' Talk’ N Shop podcast, The Young Bucks' Matt Jackson spoke about how close Gallows and Anderson came to debuting for AEW during the first episode of Dynamite along with "another Bullet Club person who you may not want to talk about."
"When we were originally going to do Dynamite, we were going to debut at Madison Square Garden. After the match, three of you, not just the two of you, the three of you were going to jump the guardrail and we were going to have like a Bullet Club reunion. We were gonna throw up the too sweet and then the three of you were going to jump us and make us bloody and destroy us and then we were going to be off to the races.
And it obviously didn’t work out. I remember the first guy in this conversation we’re talking about right now, he buzzed us and he’s like ‘I just got too good of an offer, and I would have never got the offer without your guys offer, so I just wanted to say thank you.’"
While Styles is not mentioned by name, he's obviously the most likely candidate. Finn Balor is also a possibility, but the timeline coincides with AJ signing a massive 5-year deal with WWE back in March. We're glad The Phenomenal One stayed put, but one can't help but wonder how that Bullet Club reunion would have played out.
Styles is expected to reenter the Intercontinental Title picture at Clash of Champions.
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