William Regal talked about the development of the Blackpool Combat Club faction in AEW, during an interview with The Blackpool Gazette:
“I would love to claim it was my idea, but it wasn’t. It was Jon Moxley’s idea. I was initially planning to take a year off, I wasn’t going to do anything because I haven’t done anything other than wrestling for the last 39 years. All of a sudden, I heard Jon’s name was involved which piqued my interest even more and it’s ended up how it’s ended up. Straight away there was a chemistry there because in real life there’s a chemistry there. People know a lot about me and Bryan but they might not know as much about me and Jon but these are stories we can tell over time. Jon came up to me and said he’s got a great idea for a name, because he had come up with different Blackpool things. I told him it’s not about me, it’s about the two of them, I’m just a spare part here and riding on your coattails. But he insisted we called it this. That meant a lot because Blackpool has given me everything good in my life and I’ve done everything I can do to make sure that, regardless of where I went, I was always billed from Blackpool.”
“I didn’t think it would go any further than that conversation but then we get to television last week and he showed me his phone and he’s got these designs for different stuff. I replied ‘oh, are we actually going to do this then? This is a thing?’ We went out that night and I had no idea he was going to say it on TV, but he said it and the next morning there are t-shirts out, so I ran with it. When you get an opportunity, you run with it. So that was how it happened.”
