Andrade says he was supposed to wrestle Will Ospreay at AEW X NJPW Forbidden Door

Rumors were abound earlier this week that Andrade was pulled from being able to wrestle on the AEW and NJPW joint PPV venture known as Forbidden Door. Andrade expressed frustration at both CMLL and AAA about not being allowed to work with NJPW.

Konnan claimed that AAA had nothing to do with that.

That led to speculation that CMLL had a hand in putting the kibosh on Andrade. CMLL and NJPW are partners in exchanging talent between Mexico and Japan. The relationship was more fruitful in the past before COVID, when the promotions ran their annual Fantastica Mania tour together each year. Now that the world is opening up more, CMLL sent Titan to compete in the NJPW Best of the Super Juniors tournament. CMLL has an attitude against their talent appearing on the same shows as AAA luchadores. It seems that this spilled over into NJPW for the Forbidden Door show.

Back to Andrade’s frustrations. He shed light on the situation in a Spanish interview with Hugo Savinovich for Lucha Libre Online.

Andrade has no issues with AEW in regard to this ordeal. The discussed plan for his participation in Forbidden Door was a singles match against Will Ospreay. The idea was for Andrade to wrestle a match in Japan for NJPW to set up the feud. Andrade was excited about the opportunity.

After a week passed, AEW commented that Andrade can’t work the PPV. He believes the same stance applies for Fenix and Pentagon, but he’s not sure. All he knows is that he can’t work with NJPW. Word was that Mexicans who wrestle for AAA aren’t allowed to mix with NJPW. The belief is that this stems from CMLL’s relationship with NJPW.

Andrade was also upset with AAA for different reasons. He is not a contracted wrestler for AAA, but he does have an agreement to work the three Triplemania events this year. During that time, Andrade agreed not to wrestle in CMLL while fulfilling those AAA dates. When the second chapter of Triplemania XXX rolled around for June 18, Andrade was not on the card. The point of frustration stems over AAA never reaching out to cancel him for the show. That may have caused conflict in dates for potentially wrestling in Japan.

It sounds like a confusing situation all around. One thing for sure is that this cost fans the treat of seeing Andrade versus Ospreay, and that is a bummer. Let’s hope AEW can find a way to work this out in the future, so we can see Andrade interact with Los Ingobernables de Japon — a spin-off of the group he founded when he wrestled under a mask as La Sombra, and led by his old tag partner...

NJPWGlobal’s Twitter

...former IWGP Heavyweight champ, Tetsuya Naito.