Will Ospreay is the person who is by far the leading candidate for the AEW signing announcement tomorrow. The one thing is he would more than fit the bill for a major announcement. PWInsider reported that New Japan
had given Ospreay permission to negotiate. We had figured with the AEW/NJPW working agreement that it would make sense for New Japan to allow this deal to be announced now. As noted previously, he had hired Barry Bloom, the agent of The Young Bucks, Kenny Omega, Chris Jericho, Bill Goldberg, formerly Paul Levesque and tons of others for decades to handle his talks. Everyone, WWE, New Japan, Impact and more wanted him. If handled well, this would greatly help AEW in the U.K,. and the timing of the announcement would make sense for AEW just because they could use a new signing and because of the Wembley Stadium tickets going on sale in two weeks. Ospreay will not be an immediate ratings game changer. I don't know that anyone except for John Cena, Cody Rhodes or Roman Reigns would be right now and none of those are going to be in AEW any time soon. But Ospreay does add depth at the top and there are countless new opponents he's never worked with. It also would enable Ospreay to at least work major New Japan shows and perhaps RevPro shows where he's been very loyal this past year. Hopefully whoever it is the deal in actuality is done, because as Christian Cage noted, when he was heavily teased as a surprise, while he did verbally agree, he hadn't signed before they were doing the tease.