The on-screen rivalry between CM Punk and Kevin Owens may be rooted in something a lot more real than typical WWE storytelling.
Owens became the number-one contender to Punk’s Undisputed WWE Championship after winning at SummerSlam 2026 Night Two, and the two have already shared a heated segment on SmackDown as their program gets underway.
According to Bryan Alvarez on the latest Wrestling Observer Radio, he doesn’t believe the two men actually like each other.
I don’t think they like each other.
Dave Meltzer went further, tracing the tension back to the fallout of Punk’s WWE exit and lawsuit years ago. Per Meltzer, Punk made the decision to completely cut ties with anyone still connected to WWE at the time, worried those relationships could compromise the break he was trying to make. That reportedly included friends like Kofi Kingston, who Meltzer said were blindsided by the sudden distance.
Punk basically said, ‘These guys at WWE, they may go back to WWE. We have to break away. We cannot talk to anyone from WWE.’ So Punk cut off everyone from WWE. Kofi Kingston was a good friend of his. There were others. He cut them off cold. They were all stunned. It’s like, ‘I thought we were friends.’ Cut him off cold because of the lawsuit.
Meltzer explained that Punk asked Colt Cabana to do the same, and Cabana agreed — but the situation came to a head when Cabana was spotted going out for pizza with Kevin Owens and Sami Zayn, both still in developmental with WWE at the time.
He told Cabana to do the same thing, and Cabana agreed to do the same thing. At the time, I believe Sami Zayn and Kevin Owens were in developmental, so they were not main roster guys. And they were coming through Chicago, and they went out for pizza with Colt Cabana, and Punk found out, and that was it.
According to Meltzer, that pizza outing became a turning point, with Punk’s reaction to it setting off a chain of events that eventually factored into the larger story of AEW’s formation. Meltzer summed it up saying Kevin Owens ended up being a significant part of that history.
Everything that’s happened in wrestling, everything that happened in AEW, it all came because Colt Cabana went out to pizza with Kevin Owens and Sami Zayn. So Kevin Owens is a big part of this story.”
“Colt Cabana went out to pizza with two of his buddies, and everything that happened in AEW was because of that. Everything stemmed from that. And here we are. And now Kevin Owens is doing a program with CM Punk for the first time in their careers.
Now, more than a decade removed from that chapter, Owens and Punk are working directly against each other for the first time in their careers — a pairing that, according to those close to the situation, may be carrying more real tension into the segments than storyline alone would suggest.
