Wade Barrett made a recent appearance on the “Even Stronger” podcast to discuss a wide range of topics including a faction he was once a part of.
The WWE SmackDown announcer reflected on the legacy of his Nexus faction in WWE and how he thinks it ended earlier than it should’ve. He said,
“I think there was probably an era from about 2002 until about 09-2010 where I think the show got stale because it was the same seven or eight top guys at the time who had been running the show for the duration of that. So I think the company was starting to realize, ‘Look, some of these guys that we’ve had holding this down for years now, they’re starting to get aged out. We really, really need fresh stars because the next 10 years are not looking good unless we start building them now.’ So I was kind of lucky that I was along that wave. Sheamus is another one who separately came up around that time, Drew McIntyre. We all got hired on the same day. We’re pretty close. So I contrast and compare myself with those two regularly but we got caught up in this wave of ‘Look we need new talent. We need new guys. We need fresh stars.’ So I was fortunate that my rise through the developmental ranks came at that time, which meant the company was actively looking for new stars.”
He continued, “Nexus for all of us who were in the group was just a mind-blowing experience. It’s something that even though I think it died prematurely, it’s something that people still want to talk to me about this day. It probably only lasted six months really Nexus but people still to this day want to talk about the time we ripped up the ring, the time we attacked John Cena. The time we beat up Vince McMahon and ran the company. Really exciting times. It completely changed the trajectory of my life. To have a massive impact on your debut like that. You can’t really ask for too much more as a young and coming star and I hope that helped show the company ‘Hey, there’s a way forward here to debut dominant young groups of stars,’ which we saw with the Shield a few years later. They knocked it out of the park so maybe we were the catalyst for some of that.”
