Anthony Ogogo's faction claim exposes AEW's biggest early booking failure

The Olympic What-If

Anthony Ogogo just dropped a tidbit that made me spill my morning coffee. He recently claimed he was originally planned for a major early AEW faction. He didn't drop the exact stable name in the headline making the rounds, but my mind immediately went to the tape.

Think back to 2019 and 2020 AEW. The company was essentially a collection of gangs. You couldn't walk down the hallway at Daily's Place without bumping into a group of guys in matching tracksuits. The Inner Circle. The Elite. The Dark Order. The Nightmare Collective. We try very hard to forget that last one.

If Ogogo had been slotted into a premier group right out of the gate, things might look entirely different for the Olympic medalist. Instead, he got sucked into the inescapable vortex that was the Codyverse.

The Codyverse Trap

Let's be brutally honest here. Anthony Ogogo is one of the biggest "what ifs" of AEW's first three years. He had genuine, undeniable crossover appeal. He is an Olympic bronze medalist in boxing. He is a legitimate tough guy with a built-in finishing move that required zero suspension of disbelief: a right hand to the gut or the jaw. You don't need to learn a top rope Canadian Destroyer or a triple-rotation moonsault when you can legitimately knock a man unconscious with a single punch.

But professional wrestling is a bizarre business. Instead of being presented as an absolute killer, an untamed weapon to be unleashed by a smart manager, his trajectory hit a brick wall almost immediately.

What if he had taken Jake Hager's spot in the Inner Circle? Let's just sit with that thought for a second. Chris Jericho needed a heavy. Hager brought legitimate MMA credentials to the table, but Ogogo had the British swagger. He could actually talk. He had a natural, arrogant charisma that Hager has literally never possessed in his entire career, whether in WWE or his current run in AEW. Ogogo standing silently behind Jericho, wearing a tailored suit, occasionally stepping up to just fold a guy in half with a body shot, would have gotten him over in three weeks.

Instead, we got The Factory.

The Black Hole of The Factory

Ah, The Factory. The absolute black hole of television momentum. QT Marshall is a highly respected trainer and apparently a very useful guy backstage. But putting a shiny new toy like Ogogo in a stable led by QT Marshall was a catastrophic booking error. It was like putting a Ferrari engine in a battered 1998 Honda Civic. It just didn't make any sense. Nobody bought QT as a menacing kingpin, so nobody bought Ogogo as his enforcer.

And then came the feud with Cody Rhodes. This is where I have to be intensely critical of AEW's early creative direction. May 2021. The build to Double or Nothing. Cody Rhodes inexplicably decided he needed to solve world peace by wrapping himself in the American flag and fighting a British guy.

It was baffling from day one. Ogogo wasn't even cutting aggressive anti-American promos. He was just a confident, slightly arrogant boxer who thought he was better than the professional wrestlers. But Cody went full Rocky IV. We got that agonizing, painfully awkward weigh-in segment that died a miserable death in front of a live crowd. We got the now-infamous "American Dream" promo that felt like it was written for an entirely different storyline in a different decade.

Ogogo lost the match, obviously. He took the pinfall after Cody hit a Vertebreaker. Fine, it's a devastating move. But the damage to Ogogo's aura was permanent. He was positioned as a cartoon foreign heel in a company that explicitly promised us "sports-based presentation." He was treated like a mid-card villain from a 1985 Saturday morning cartoon.

The Dynasty Reality Check

Then the eye injuries happened. This is the truly tragic part of the Ogogo story that the internet wrestling community often ignores. The man has had something like ten major eye surgeries. His legitimate boxing career was cut short because he was essentially legally blind in one eye. He risked his remaining vision, his actual quality of life, to try and make it in professional wrestling. You have to respect that level of insane dedication.

But while he was recovering in the UK, the AEW roster exploded.

This brings us to the reality of today. We are exactly two days away from AEW Dynasty in Kansas City. Just look at the card for this Sunday. Look at the sheer volume of elite-level talent crammed into that locker room. Will Ospreay. Kazuchika Okada. Swerve Strickland. Bryan Danielson. The standard for in-ring work in AEW has skyrocketed to a point where a guy whose primary offense consists of basic boxing combinations is going to struggle to stand out on a three-hour pay-per-view.

If Ogogo had been established early in a major, protected faction, he would have a solid foundation. He would be a made man in the eyes of the audience. If you look at Sammy Guevara, despite all his bizarre starts and stops, he still has the lingering equity of being an original Inner Circle member. Wardlow, despite being booked into oblivion over the last year, still gets a reaction because fans remember his run in The Pinnacle.

Ogogo just has the equity of being the guy Cody beat to end a fictional cold war.

Closing the Window

It’s frustrating because wrestling desperately needs legitimate badasses. Not guys who play tough guys on television, but men you look at and think, "Yeah, I absolutely would not mess with him." Ogogo fits that bill perfectly. He has the aesthetic. He has the deep, commanding voice. He has the actual, documented history of punching people in the face for a living at an elite international level.

When he popped up recently talking about these scrapped faction plans, it just highlighted how chaotic AEW's creative process can be behind the curtain. Plans change. That is the nature of wrestling. But some changes alter the entire trajectory of a performer's career.

Imagine an alternate timeline. Imagine Ogogo is brought in as the hired gun for MJF in The Pinnacle instead of Shawn Spears. Imagine him alongside PAC in Death Triangle, replacing the high-flying Lucha Bros with a much more hard-hitting, brutal European style. The possibilities were endless, and almost all of them were better than what we actually got.

Instead, he spent his formative wrestling years standing next to Aaron Solo and Nick Comoroto in empty arenas during the pandemic era. No disrespect to those guys, but they aren't exactly moving the needle or selling out arenas.

We can't rewrite history. Ogogo is still around, occasionally popping up on the fringes of Ring of Honor or doing commentary work. He is undeniably talented on the microphone. But the window for him to be a top-tier monster heel might have permanently closed simply because the roster got entirely too crowded and his initial presentation was so deeply flawed.

AEW is a completely different company now than it was in 2019. Dynasty is going to be a massive show this weekend. The matches will be mechanically incredible. But sometimes, when I see a bloated, pointless faction segment taking up fifteen minutes on Dynamite, I think about guys like Anthony Ogogo.

He is the ultimate cautionary tale of AEW's early booking. A guy who had all the physical tools, all the legitimate credentials, but ended up in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the absolute wrong creative direction. It is a harsh reminder that in professional wrestling, having a knockout right hand isn't enough. You need the machine behind you. And for Anthony Ogogo, that machine stalled out before the race even began.