The Story So Far: Will Ospreay Vs. Kyle Fletcher At AEW Revolution

There is a very fine line between love and hate. One good decision can turn someone from a mortal enemy into a friend for life, while one bad decision can turn someone who feels like a family member into a complete stranger overnight. Over the years, both Will Ospreay and Kyle Fletcher have made decisions that fit into both of these categories, but as AEW Revolution 2025 approaches, there's not much love left between the two. On Sunday night, Ospreay and Fletcher will wrestle a singles match against each other for a third consecutive AEW pay-per-view in Los Angeles, California. The score between these two must be settled, and the only solution is to lock them inside a steel cage until only one of them walks out.

For younger AEW fans, this is simply a culmination of a story that has played out for the better part of a year, but for those who have followed Ospreay and Fletcher's careers, there is a lot more riding on this than some may think. It's a story that spans more than half the continents on planet earth; that has divided an empire; and that has already produced some of the most exciting matches in AEW history — and it's only getting uglier from here. 

At one point they were friends. Then they were brothers. Now each is ready to bleed the other dry for the sake of proving himself as the better man. How did we get here? For Will Ospreay and Kyle Fletcher, this is The Story So Far.

The year is 2017. and the independent wrestling scene in the United Kingdom (and the rest of Europe) is experiencing a boom the likes of which it hadn't experienced in years. To get in on the action, an 18-year old Kyle Fletcher uproots his entire life to move halfway across the world in the hopes that he will one day be a successful professional wrestler. Along the way, he meets another man from Australia, Mark Davis, and together they would form the formidable team known as Aussie Open.

Fletcher and Davis would travel around the UK indies, winning championships in places like ATTACK!, Defiant, and most importantly for our purposes, PROGRESS Wrestling, where Aussie Open would first get in the ring with Will Ospreay. Ospreay and his then-tag team partner Paul Robinson would take the PROGRESS Tag Team Championships from Aussie Open in December 2018, but a bond was formed between the three men on that night that would see them become closer than a lot of brothers leading up to a major world event: the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Since Fletcher and Davis were unable to travel back home, Ospreay offered his own home up to Aussie Open during the pandemic. If their bond wasn't strong enough when the pandemic started, it was unbreakable by the time venues started opening up again. When Ospreay returned to Japan, he was given the chance to form his own stable, the United Empire, and after Davis recovered from an injury at the end of 2020, Ospreay was given approval by NJPW to bring Aussie Open to the company on a permanent basis.

When Aussie Open officially joined the United Empire, they wouldn't just be riding alongside "The Aerial Assassin." They would also have to bond with Jeff Cobb, the Great-O-Khan, Aaron Henare, and TJP, who joined the group one week after Fletcher and Davis. By the time the Australian duo arrived in Japan, Ospreay had already won the IWGP Junior Heavyweight Championship three times, the NEVER Openweight Championship once, and was even the IWGP World Heavyweight Champion in May 2021, though he was forced to vacate the title due to injury; Fletcher and Davis knew they had to impress.

To start, they would use NJPW's partnership with UK promotion RevPro to capture the Undisputed British Tag Team Championships before making sure that NJPW's US brand, STRONG, knew the United Empire wasn't content with being successful in Japan. Fletcher and Davis became the first-ever NJPW STRONG Openweight Tag Team Champions in 2022, a year that saw Aussie Open's stock rise across the world thanks to a classic match with FTR and a run to the finals of the World Tag League tournament that they had been unable to enter until that year due to COVID and injuries.

Aussie Open would eventually capture the IWGP Heavyweight Tag Team Championships in 2023, as well as having a second run with the NJPW STRONG Openweight Tag Team Championships. However, both sets of titles would have to be vacated by Aussie Open as Davis had suffered an injury. By this point, Ospreay had done almost everything he had set out to do in NJPW, as had Aussie Open, and the trio's search for new challenges led them stateside in 2023 — but it was while Davis was injured that the seeds for Sunday's story began to be planted.

Thanks to the "Forbidden Door" between AEW and NJPW now being more of a Breezy Archway, Ospreay, Fletcher, and Davis actually debuted in AEW back in 2022 in the build up to the first Forbidden Door pay-per-view, as well as participating in the tournament to crown the first-ever AEW World Trios Champions. However, those cameo appearances became permanent as Aussie Open were signed by AEW in May 2023 while Davis was still injured, with AEW President Tony Khan paying for Davis' treatment personally.

Ospreay would pop up again over the summer to build up his match with Kenny Omega at the 2023 Forbidden Door pay-per-view, getting the chance to reunite with Fletcher along the way. When Ospreay traveled back to Japan for the G1 Climax tournament, Davis returned from injury and Aussie Open won themselves another piece of gold, the ROH World Tag Team Championships, which they would hold until the All In London pay-per-view that August, losing them to AEW World Champion MJF and his No. 1 contender, Adam Cole.

Fletcher and Davis would move on to the AEW Tag Team Championships, then held by familiar faces FTR, with the two teams having a hard-hitting match the first-ever WrestleDream pay-per-view in October, a match so hard-hitting that Davis would get injured again, this time suffering a serious wrist injury. In November, Ospreay would announce that he has signed a deal with AEW, but wanted to honor his commitments to NJPW, meaning that fans would have to wait until March 2024 to see him officially become "All Elite."

Throughout all these AEW appearances, there was one man — an invisible hand if you will — who claimed to be actingwith good intentions, but would ultimately be the one to divide the United Empire.

In the lead-up to his match with Kenny Omega at Forbidden Door 2023, Don Callis offered Ospreay a helping hand. Callis wanted to cut Omega out of wrestling completely, and saw Ospreay as the natural successor to the "Best Bout Machine." This would ultimately lead Ospreay to become a member of The Don Callis Family along with the likes of Konosuke Takeshita, Sammy Guevara, and Powerhouse Hobbs. Thinking that Callis was trying to put together a group that could legitimately call themselves the best in the world, and with one of his best friends involved as a key member, Fletcher wanted in on the action now that he was flying solo in the wake of Davis being injured.

Fletcher impressed Callis enough to be welcomed into the family, and after adopting a much more vicious style and tapping into a more violent side of his personality, Fletcher became the ROH World Television Champion, and was seen to be as good as Ospreay in the eyes of Callis. When Ospreay finally joined AEW on a full-time basis, he was as over the moon to reunite with Fletcher as "The Aussie Arrow" was, but something wasn't sitting right with Ospreay.

Ospreay came into AEW as a beloved fan faovrite, and didn't want anything to do with the underhanded tactics that Callis had become so used to. Clearly torn, Fletcher knew that he had to stay loyal to the family and do what Callis said, but he also knew that deep down, what he was doing was wrong, and what Ospreay was saying was right. Ospreay agreed to be let out of his contract with the family after his loss to Swerve Strickland at Forbidden Door 2024, and it wasn't long before Fletcher started to see sense.

Following Ospreay's victory over MJF for the AEW International (fka American) Championship at All In London 2024, Fletcher had somehow gotten through to Callis and made an agreement with him that would allow him to officially reunite with Ospreay on a permanent basis, while also do the family's bidding when he was called upon.

This would lead to Ospreay and Fletcher officially teaming up for the first time as the revamped United Empire in well over a year, and the first time they had teamed up as a duo since before the COVID-19 pandemic. Things started off hot for them as well, entering the first-ever tag team Casino Gauntlet match in September 2024 in an attempt to earn a shot at The Young Bucks and the AEW Tag Team Championships, with the AEW EVP's believing that the company's tag team division needed something new. Ospreay and Fletcher would pick up the victory and face The Young Bucks at the 2024 Grand Slam edition of "AEW Dynamite," but they would ultimately walk away empty handed.

Why did Ospreay and Fletcher lose the match? Fletcher wanted to make sure that they were going to win, and whipped out Callis' trusty screwdriver he had become synonymous with. However, Ospreay was having none of it and wanted to pick up the win properly, rather than stooping to the depths of what his former family would do to win. The problem was Fletcher was still a part of the family, and no matter how close he was to Ospreay, he had obligations and commitments to Callis that couldn't be overlooked. He would do the right thing at times, but only to please Ospreay, and Fletcher would eventually show where his heart truly lay.

At AEW WrestleDream 2024, Fletcher pledged his loyalty to The Don Callis Family by attacking Ospreay with the screwdriver during the AEW International Championship match that saw Konosuke Takeshita dethrone Ospreay. When asked the inevitable question of "whym" Fletcher would put it simply: he wanted to be nothing like Will Ospreay.

Due to how close they were, their shared history, and similar paths to AEW from the UK indies to NJPW, as well as the fact that they both wrestled in a very similar way, many people never saw Kyle Fletcher — they only saw an Australian version of Will Ospreay. He was tired of playing second fiddle, he was done with living in someone else's shadow, and he wanted to show everyone that he was not only his own man — but even better than the man everyone compared him to. This resulted in Fletcher completely changing his look. He ditched the long tights in favor of trunks, he bulked up to the point where he looked like he ate the old version of himself, and most notably, Fletcher shaved his head on an episode of "AEW Dynamite" in October, and has kept his head shaved ever since.

While Fletcher paraded around AEW as a new man, Ospreay was recovering from the attack, but made his return ahead of Full Gear in November and challenged Fletcher to a match to see how different he really was. Fletcher answered this question in dramatic fashion as he pulled off an upset victory over Ospreay at the November pay-per-view, and would follow that up with a stellar run in the 2024 Continental Classic. But Ospreay would ultimately get his revenge in the tournament, eliminating Fletcher in the semi-finals.

Just because a new year had arrived, didn't mean that Ospreay and Fletcher were done with each other. In January 2025, Kenny Omega returned to the company after over a year away battling diverticulitis, and when Don Callis tried to ruin the party, Omega didn't hesitate in trying to annihilate his former manager. Callis' family were quick to thwart Omega's efforts, which resulted in Ospreay coming to Omega's rescue — a surprising move to many given their bad blood in the past.

With that said, the old saying of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" rang true as Ospreay and Omega banded together to take down The Don Callis Family once and for all. While Omega had unfinished business with Konosuke Takeshita, Ospreay needed to rid himself of Fletcher, leading to a challenge being made for AEW's debut trip to Australia of Omega and Ospreay taking on Fletcher and Takeshita. The match would take place at Grand Slam Australia in Brisbane, and despite Fletcher being Australian, the fans treated Omega and Ospreay as if they were the hometown heroes.

Omega and Ospreay picked up the win, and after all was said and done, Ospreay laid out one final challenge to his former best friend. Revolution, March 9, settle the score for good inside a steel cage, a challenge Fletcher was more than happy to accept. Callis would use the weeks leading up to Revolution to weaken Ospreay by pitting him against anyone he could find, including a reluctant Mark Davis, who has since got his own contract with the family against his will, but Ospreay vanquished every opponent put in front of him, leaving nothing stand in the way of Ospreay and Fletcher ahead of their biggest match to date.