Preparing For The 2025 FSM 50: An April Watch Diary

My first note: apologies for the lack of a March update. I was just entirely too busy.

As a reminder, I am a voter for the FSM 50, which attempts to recognize the best in-ring workers annually. The 2024 results are here. I shared my personal 2024 ballot here.

To get my earliest version of my top 50, I use a formula that assigns points by star ratings. Without going too deep into it, a 3.5-star match is worth one point, a 4-star match 5 points, a 4.5-star match 10 points, and a five-star match 18 points. I use this as my starting point for my ratings before getting into vibes, downtime, etc. It is a nerdy way to do an already nerdy activity.

My philosophy with the FSM 50 is that it is akin to voting for a sports league’s MVP. The winner should be who had the best year, not necessarily who you think is the most talented. Sometimes, the tenth-best person by raw talent has a career year, and sometimes, the best player misses half the year. It is an important distinction.

The Big Guns: WWE, AEW, and NJPW

New Japan is probably still in the driver’s seat for promotion of the year. The New Japan Cup produced several strong matches; I think Taichi vs. Zack Sabre Jr. & David Finlay vs. Yuya Uemura were the best of the bunch, with both checking in at 4.5 stars for me. I don’t think anyone was super enthusiastic about Sakura Genesis; both Oiwa vs. Takeshita and Finlay vs. Goto came out at 4.25 stars, but that’s about it for the highlight matches from that show. It’s odd when there’s as many notebook matches from the “road to” shows leading to the big New Japan show, but that’s what happened leading up to Sakura Genesis; you could make an argument that the IWGP Junior Heavyweight Tag Team Championship match of Robbie X & Taiji Ishimori challenging Kosei Fujita & Robbie Eagles was as good as either Sakura Genesis match. I haven’t gotten to Windy City Riot or Wrestling Dontaku yet.

WWE continues to deliver mixed results. Vengeance Day was a fairly strong show, though mostly in the 3.5-3.75 range; only Josh Briggs & Yoshiki Inamura vs. Axiom & Nathan Frazer broke into four stars. Kevin Owens vs. Sami Zayn from Elimination Chamber was a strong point at 4.5 stars. From Mania weekend itself, Stand & Deliver outperformed all but the best match from an underwhelming WrestleMania. I really liked Axiom & Nathan Frazer defending against Hank Walker & Tank Ledger (4.5 stars), as well as Je’Von Evans having a great performance in the main against Trick Williams & Oba Femi (4.25 stars). I only had one notebook match from Mania itself – the WWE Women’s World Championship of Bianca Belair vs. IYO Sky vs. Rhea Ripley was an easy 4.5 stars, and far better than anything else from either night. I am missing various TV matches, but I do need to get to the TLC match from the post-Mania SmackDown.

AEW has had a very strong stretch of TV the past two months with several notebook matches. Revolution was a great PPV with Mariah May-Toni Storm getting 5 stars, and both Kyle Fletcher vs. Will Ospreay & Kenny Omega vs. Konosuke Takeshita flirting with it at 4.75 stars. The Dynasty pay-per-view was somewhat disappointing in a relative lack of depth, but Mike Bailey vs. Kenny Omega vs. Ricochet was another 5 star match for me. The second best match on that show as Kyle Fletcher vs. Mark Briscoe at 4.25 stars – nothing to complain about, mind you, but given recent AEW PPV offerings, it is a bit lower than usual.

Assorted Other Matches

 Most of the smaller promotion stuff from me is in the WrestleMania week shows I reviewed:

• DEFY Living Proof
• West Coast Pro Vegas Vacation
• Marvelous Vegas
• DGUSA x Pro Wrestling Revolution The Gate of Revolution
• DGUSA The Rebirth

You can also hear me discuss the various Mania weekend shows I watched on a special episode of The Good, the Bad, and the Hungee here.

There’s a couple other matches to touch on briefly in this section.

Blue Panther vs. Hechicero, CMLL Viernes Espectacular, January 10 – CMLL YouTube (subscription required)

Blue Panther is 64 years old. Considering this, Panther had a pretty great outing here, and of course, Hechicero is a wonderful performer. There is an unfortunate botched tope from Panther where he landed more or less straight on his head. ****

Eric Young vs. Steve Maclin (c), TNA International Championship, Dog Collar Match, TNA Impact, May 8 (air date) – YouTube (free)

This is a match with a greater blade job by Maclin than it was a great match. This will go down in legend as the last match before TNA cracked down on blading, and Maclin going out of his way to shatter the Muta scale before the new rule went in place. Young didn’t hold up his end of the deal – I’m not talking about his lack of blading, but he’s pretty limited in 2025. Still, if you’re a bloody match fan, they don’t get much bloodier than this. ***3/4

Planning for May

There’s so much going on in wrestling, and with Japan’s Golden Week shows just taking place last week, the list feels terribly long as is. So, I’m replacing the self-flagellation station with a section where I talk about what I want to watch in May.

First, I want to get caught up on WWE & AEW TV matches – I need to space these out because the production style wears me down after a few matches for the former and the latter was just too much to keep up on with the Mania weekend work I did.

Secondly, I’m going to try to get through the CMLL backlog that has built up on me. I’ve already knocked out five matches, but I have 83 left to go. Yeesh.

An entirely too early top 20

1. Konosuke Takeshita (last time: #1)
2. Zack Sabre Jr. (2)
3. Will Ospreay (10)
4. Kenny Omega (5)
5. Ricochet (Unranked)
6. David Finlay (UR)
7. Kyle Fletcher (7)
8. Hirooki Goto (12)
9. Gabe Kidd (6)
10. Mike Bailey (UR)
11. (tie) Saya Kamitani (3) & Tam Nakano (3)
13. Tomohiro Ishii (9)
14. Brody King (UR)
15. Jeff Cobb (8)
16. El Desperado (UR)
17. AZM (11)
18. Mark Briscoe (UR)
19. Shun Skywalker (UR)
20. Swerve Strickland (UR)

Match recommendations

An asterisk denotes it was newly watched in March or April for me, regardless of the actual date of the match.