Kofi Kingston Discusses New Day’s Role On The NXT Brand

WWE

Kofi Kingston has discussed The New Day’s role on the NXT brand.

In December 2022, The New Day’s Kofi Kingston and Xavier Woods arrived in NXT and immediately challenged Pretty Deadly for the NXT Tag Team Championships. The duo went on to defeat Elton Prince and Kit Wilson to win the titles at NXT Deadline.

The New Day have since had matches with the likes of Brooks Jensen & Josh Briggs in tag team action and Joe Gacy in singles competition.

In a new interview with Fightful, Kingston provided some insight on how The New Day ended up on the developmental brand. He said:

“Every week we go into talent relations, they give us the rundown of what the requests are with regards to appearances and things that we have to do and social media posts and all that.”

“The guy in talent relations, [Zach], was like, ‘Hey, Shawn Michaels is specially requesting you guys to come down to NXT.’”

“So, to me, that automatically means it’s not even a request, we gotta do it. But we also wanted to do it. I’ve said it on several different interviews; Shawn Michaels has always been my guy. He was the guy that I used to watch and want to be like and motivated me to even pursue this career.”

“So of course I would do that. It was so cool. ‘You are being summoned by Shawn Michaels.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, alright. Let’s go.’ Just to be able to go to NXT and be in the midst of all that energy where people don’t necessary know what their characters are, they don’t have the amount of experience that we have.”

Reflecting on what this run means to their careers, Kofi stated:

“It’s a very special time in your career when you’re trying to figure yourself out. So for us to be able to go down there and help people find themselves and share some of the experience that we’ve had is an honor to be able to do that. Because the guys who came before us did that for us.”

“So here we are in that elder statesmen role where we can go and do that for other people and that, to me, is a beautiful thing. That’s really how our business keeps progressing. ‘Cause if we don’t pass that knowledge down then no one gets better, no one advances and the industry doesn’t thrive.”

“So it is our responsibility to be able to go out there and do that kind of stuff. Working with Pretty Deadly has been amazing.”

“It’s just something we’d been wanting to do since they were on NXT UK. Their outfits alone, you know what I’m saying? Who are these guys? What are they about? What are they doing?”

Transcription via Fightful

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