For Your Consideration: Sareee in 2024

Updated: December 23, 2024

If you drive around Los Angeles during Emmy Nomination season, you’ll see billboards all across town that have been repurposed from the latest fast food deal or any number of our locally famous auto-accident lawyers. Instead of advertising to everyone, they switch focus to only advertising to members of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, with every such billboard nothing more than a picture with no text other than the name of the show and “For Your Consideration.”

This expensive billboard real estate is taken up in hopes of convincing voters to watch the shows they are supposed to watch before making their votes, because there is so much TV to watch, even the people who get DVDs of the nominated shows mailed to their houses can’t keep up. (Trust me, and forgive the humblebrag, because I have seen piles of these unwatched discs in the homes of people I know in the academy.)  

Wrestling, much like television shows, also has so much content that viewers and voters are presented with the same level of difficulty in trying to keep up with everything that is happening. Even the most plugged-in people need some guidance on what to keep up with or catch up on – which is precisely what led to this article when Alan4L suggested someone provide a helping hand for FSM 50 voters to catch up on a candidate who I, and others, think is currently flying under the radar of voters, not just in the FSM 50 but in all of the various year-end awards.

So, if you plan to vote in any of the Match of the Year awards, the Wrestling Observer Awards, the Fightful Awards, maybe you are part of the FSM50 panel like Alan, or anything else – or maybe you just want to watch some good wrestling you didn’t see already – then FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION, here is my case for why you need to catch up on the 2024 output of SAREEE.

A Brief History of Sareee’s Triumphant Return to Japan

If there is anything we can all learn from Sareee, it is how to make up for lost time, because since she returned to Japan in May 2023, after the hot mess of her NXT run, Sareee has been going hard, working in almost every joshi promotion of note, booking and promoting her own produce shows (Sareee-ISM), winning titles and churning out notebook matches and legitimate Match of the Year caliber matches. Now 28 years old, with 13 years of wrestling experience, she has unquestionably entered the prime of her career in the last 18 months.

To briefly recap her 2023: 

• In her first match in Japan since 2020, she set up her ongoing and potentially career-defining rivalry with Chihiro Hashimoto and used it to kick start the Sareee-ISM shows, turning out a low-level Match of the Year contender (MOTYC) right out of the gate. You can watch this match for free on Sareee’s YouTube channel.
• From there she moved on to a high-level MOTYC with Arisa Nakajima, winning the SEAdLINNNG Beyond The Sea Championship (their top singles title) in a hard hitting Korakuen Hall classic that finished 18th on the 2023 Voices of Wrestling Match of the Year poll. You can watch this match on the (paywalled) SeaDLinning streaming service.
• Overall, in 2023, she ended up with 12 matches with Cagematch ratings averaging a notebook worthy 7.98 across those matches. (This is where I remind you that WWE did not know what to do with this wrestler.)

Sareee’s 2024

Sareee’s 2024 is what we are really here to discuss – Sareee’s near-total takeover of the joshi scene has been all but completed. Not only in keeping the match quality up, but somehow being able to remain a true freelancer who is able to navigate promotional politics and rise above it all, working with (almost) everyone, everywhere, all at once.

To summarize:

• She still holds the SeaDLinnning Beyond The Sea title, passing the one year anniversary of her reign in August.
• Sareee won the Marigold World Championship in July, beating one of the biggest stars in the joshi world, Giulia. She is the inaugural Marigold world champion and a freelancer who hasn’t “officially” signed with that company. This is notable as a somewhat atypical move in general for your top champion and especially for Rossy Ogawa, a famously isolationist booker.
• She wrestled for the IWGP Women’s championship in April on the biggest Joshi show of the year and had a MOTYC candidate and the consensus best bout of the show with one of the other biggest stars in the joshi world, Mayu Iwatani.
• She booked herself – while Marigold champion –  to team with both the Wonder of STARDOM champion (Natsupoi) and later the IWGP Women’s champion (Mayu Iwatani), defying the current political minefield between Marigold and Bushiroad.
• Overall (per cagematch.net), she has worked for seven “recognized” promotions, eight different produce/indie companies plus whatever the fuck we want to define Sukeban as? A rich guy’s art project produce show? (Sidebar: I went to the LA Sukeban show, ask me about it some time, it was fascinating on so many levels, good, bad and ugly.)
• Sareee-ISM continues to be an unqualified success, doing super-no-vacancy sell outs at Shinjuku FACE and selling PPVs to fans inside and outside of Japan. As noted above, she is bringing in talent from every corner of the joshi world and putting together matches you aren’t seeing anywhere else. I’ve taken to calling it “Joshi PWG” in terms of both the inter promotional matchmaking and the fact they are going for a smaller crowd with higher ticket prices in a ‘boutique’ venue rather than scaling up to a bigger venue, which were both hallmarks of peak-era PWG.

Chris’ “Notebook worthy” 2024 Sareee Matches

Specific awards to consider when casting votes

Match of the Year: 

• I have these two matches in the mix for my top five:
  • Sareee & Mayu Iwatani vs. Chihiro Hashimoto & Veny
  • Sareee vs. Mayu Iwatani 

Most Outstanding Wrestler  / FSM 50 / etc

• I think Sareee has solidified her case as a second or third choice for this award. Her big matches (special singles, title matches, Sareee-ISM main events) always deliver and have set an expectation of a notebook match at worst, Match of the Year Candidate a best. 

Flair-Thesz Award / Wrestler of the Year

• It is difficult for me to make a case for this award, based on how I personally interpret the criteria, but given Dave Meltzer’s own case for Will Ospreay in 2023, about being a wrestler who bounced from promotion to promotion, holding titles and putting on high-end matches, you could, if you were so inclined, take that same logic and apply it here. Also, Dave stumping for Ospreay this year, when he fits very little of the criteria for the award means I can do that here for Sareee. Why not, right?

Japan MVP

• I think she is on a short list, if not #1, of people who could win this award, especially given the lack of clear standout candidate(s) in the major puro promotions, as evidenced by the Tokyo Sports award ending up with Zack Sabre Jr, who I like a lot and admire his year, but was it that much, if any, better, honestly? 

Women’s MVP

• This should be an absolute slam dunk. If she doesn’t win this, there should be an official investigation. Tokyo Sports agree and gave her their Womens MVP award.

Promotion of the Year / Booker of the Year / Promoter of the Year

• Again, an outside candidate but a promotion/booker/promoter that I believe you shouldn’t automatically rule out. All of the major league promotions have clear pros and cons to their cases for these awards, meanwhile Sareee-ISM is both a critical and commercial success. However, I do agree with the idea that it is hard to vote for these awards when there have only been three shows under the Sareee-ISM banner this year. That said, even a small sample size can sometimes produce the correct outcome.

Closing Statement

In summation, considering the totality of everything she has done inside and outside of the ring, Sareee has had a 2024 quite unlike any other wrestler in the world and deserves to be recognized for it.

This article is just a simple and polite request to put aside any pre-held notions of “joshi-inflation” and to study the tape; to consider the circumstances of how she is navigating a promotional warright now to book interpromotional ‘dream’ matches and to consider that the biggest fumble of a wrestler in recent history isn’t a pretty boy from New Orleans or a washed forty-something from Chicago, it was Sareee’s run in NXT. 

So please, respectfully, read this billboard and take some time to make a CONSIDERATION of Sareee before casting any votes this awards season.