On February 8th AEW Dynamite landed in El Paso, Texas, and featured a number of the company’s biggest stars along with a shock title change.
However, some stars were notable for their absence, especially given the location of the show and its large Hispanic community. Fans who had been hoping to see Bandido and the Lucha Bros in action were left disappointed. Although it appears that their absence was very much out of AEW’s control.
Speaking on Wrestling Observer Radio, Dave Meltzer revealed that the trio was missing due to visa issues. He added that the same problems have also affected WWE in recent weeks with the likes of Ilja Dragunov and Tyler Bate only recently returning to television.
“A lot of people brought up, what happened with Pentagon, Fenix and Bandido? There’s visa issues and it’s all through wrestling right now.
WWE’s finally cleared it up, they had (Ilja) Dragunov back and (Meiko) Satomura’s coming back. But so many of these people have had issues coming in, and right now… here you are in El Paso, Texas, and Bandido, Fenix and Pentagon would have been over like crazy on this show, and they were not even on the show.
They weren’t on Dark ‘Elevation’, I knew they weren’t gonna be on Dynamite, but they weren’t on Rampage either.
“hey probably would have been the most over guys on the entire show actually. I would think Pentagon would have been the most over guy on the show, had he been available for the show.”
AEW narrowly avoided disaster in January due to visa issues, with Kenny Omega almost missing the finale of The Elite’s Best of Seven series with Death Triangle.
What Happened On AEW Dynamite?
Of the stars who did make it to Dynamite, AEW World Champion MJF saw off Konosuke Takeshita in a World Title Eliminator, and a bloody Bryan Danielson triumphed over Rush, securing his match with MJF at Revolution.
The Elite retained the AEW World Trios Titles with a win over Top Flight and AR Fox, while The Gunns shocked The Acclaimed to win the World Tag Team Titles.
H/t to Wrestle Talk