The New Day may no longer be a group, but the stable had a consistent presence on WWE for well over a decade. While The New Day officially debuted on the WWE main roster in 2014, the seeds were planted while Big E and Xavier Woods were still in FCW.
While talking about the early ideas for the group on Insight with Chris Van Vliet, Big E explained that the original idea was to do something similar to the Nation of Domination with former WWE star Abraham Washington as the leader.
“So we were in FCW, it was me, Byron Saxton was still an active wrestler at the time. It was me, Saxton, Woods, and Abe. We all talked, but Abe was kind of positioned as the leader, and we had this group, and Abe was very much someone who unfortunately liked to push the envelope a little bit too much. I’m not going to talk about the reason he got fired, you could look that up. But he’s someone who always liked to kind of to put his foot over the line and see how far we could push things. We originally called the group the Clan, and it stood for Citizens Liberation of American Nationalism. It was supposed to be this militant black group, much in the vein of the Nation of Domination.
We all grew up loving The Nation, and we wanted to do something in that vein. That group initially, it was initially the Clan, then we became The Plan, because the office said we’re not doing that. So we exchanged citizens for people, so that was it. We came out in white and red, so that very first suit that you see Woods come out in, that was like his old stuff from when we were pitching The Plan in FCW, so we never got to do that on FCW TV. We did a few weeks of that, and then eventually the office in FCW said it’s dead, you guys can’t do this anymore, move on.”
Big E went on to say that when he and Xavier Woods made it to the main roster they weren’t having the best time at first, but eventually recruited Kofi Kingston and repeatedly pitched The New Day idea to the writers.
“That idea was shelved, and then we had to go back to repitching, but eventually we got to be The New Day that people knew and loved,” Big E said.