Back in 2019, Case Lowe, a longtime Voices of Wrestling contributor, lucharesu expert, and cohost of the Open the Voice Gate podcast (the best coverage of Dragon Gate you’ll find anywhere), wrote a column arguing that the Young Bucks are the greatest tag team of all-time, citing evidence of their catalogue of great matches, the awards in the Wrestling Observer Newsletter they’ve taken home, and their drawing record.
Are We Sure the Young Bucks Aren’t the Greatest Tag Team Ever?
Again, this was in 2019, when AEW was still in its infancy and hadn’t even aired the inaugural Dynamite yet. Think of all the spectacular, big-time Bucks matches we’ve had since. It’s become a bit of a meme for a certain subset of wrestling fans on social media to share this article every time the Bucks fire off another great match. Case wrote this column in the thick of the Young Bucks being the target of controversy and a wrestling culture war that has only continued to escalate since with the rise of AEW and the clown car full of grifter podcasters and other wrestling media members who I’ll refrain from naming because you already know who I’m talking about because I’m already poking the beehive with what I’m about to write about anyways. The divisiveness of the Bucks hasn’t really ended and may never will, but they were able to cement themselves last year into the WON Hall of Fame.
While I don’t think I’m nearly as ahead of the curve as Case, I would like to lay out a similar argument for a contemporary of the Bucks and a target just about as divisive in the wrestling media landscape and online discussion as the Jackson brothers: Will Ospreay.
The Case for Will Ospreay as the Greatest In-Ring Performer of All-Time
I think Will Ospreay is the greatest in-ring performer of all-time.
I think he is even better than the likes of All Japan’s legendary Four Pillars (Mitsuharu Misawa, Toshiaki Kawada, Akira Taue, and Kenta Kobashi), Kenny Omega, Hiroshi Tanahashi, Kazuchika Okada, Manami Toyota, Ric Flair, Bryan Danielson, Terry Funk, Blue Panther, and whatever other all-time great you want to name.
This is no slight, undervaluing, or disrespect to any other wrestler; Ospreay is just that special. Will has been the subject of countless debates over psychology, selling, and movesets more than maybe any other wrestler in history. While a lot of these debates come from a place of bad faith and often feature talking points that feel like they’ve only watched Ospreay matches from 2014, the reality is wrestling is very subjective, both in terms of how a match resonates with fans and what makes a pro wrestler great. Is it all about work between the bells, charisma, promo ability, or drawing ability that makes them great? The weight of each of those categories radically differs between who and what fanbase you ask. While I think Will Ospreay has an okay drawing record, I can’t sit here and tell you he’s Hulk Hogan or Tetsuya Naito. While I would argue Will has been an undeniably great promo ever since settling into his character a bit after the start of the United Empire, he was also maligned in that regard for a good chunk of his career, although even going back and watching promos that were panned like his version of CM Punk’s “Pipe Bomb,” they’re delivered with a lot of passion and fire. However, I can’t pretend he’s on the level of, say, the stars of Jim Crockett Promotions on the mic.
What cannot be disputed is the in-ring ability and match catalogue of Will Ospreay.
Cagematch.net is not a perfect resource by any means. We’ve seen brigading and shows being massively overrated by WWE fans in recent years, ever since Tony Khan name-dropped it. While I don’t think Cagematch has a bias towards any style of wrestling, you certainly notice that lucha, particularly old school lucha, does not get the same ratings and amount of votes as major American promotions or prestige puro matches. Being a German website, Cagmatch loves some Westside Xtreme Wrestling. With that being said, I think Cagematch is an invaluable resource. While wrestling is extremely subjective, and I may disagree on particular matches, I think Cagematch provides a good consensus that fans who explore things outside of WWE can agree on. For example, would I ever even consider BUH BUH Ray Dudley & D-Von Dudley vs. Christian & Edge vs. The Hardys in my own personal top 100 matches of all-time list? Not in a million years, but I agree with about 80% of the top 100 rated matches on there.
To me, Cagematch consistency is what proves you’re a truly great worker. Randy Savage once said something about the cream of the crop rising to the top.
With that in mind, I combed through Cagematch for who I believe to be every wrestler (and one tag team) with at least 20 matches with a 9.00 rating or better:
- KENTA: 20
- Mayu Iwatani: 20
- Katsuhiko Nakajima: 21
- El Generico/Sami Zayn: 22
- Manami Toyota: 23
- Toshiaki Kawada: 23
- The Young Bucks: 24
- Zack Sabre Jr.: 29
- Shingo Takagi: 29
- WALTER/Gunther: 30
- Kota Ibushi: 30
- Mitsuharu Misawa:31
- Tomohiro Ishii: 32
- Kenta Kobashi: 34
- Hiroshi Tanahashi: 35
- Bryan Danielson: 41
- Kenny Omega: 42
- Kazuchika Okada: 43
- Will Ospreay: 56
It’s pretty darn hard to have a match so universally considered great that Cagematch can agree on a 9.00 rating or better. There are some wrestlers whom I consider great workers, but they may only have one match in their catalogue that meets this criteria. Most wrestlers never even have one match that can get a 9.00 or higher. To have 20 or more, you have to be the elite of the elite, and I don’t think anyone would look at most of the names on this list and say they aren’t an objectively great performer. I don’t think you will find a single wrestling fan who does not think Bryan Danielson is great, even if you have a strong bias towards a particular promotion or house style. Will Ospreay has 15 more 9.00+ rated matches than Danielson, and yet when you broach the subject of him being an all-time great, not only will you get backlash from fans who are WWE hardcores or are parroting talking points from certain podcasts about how Ospreay just does flips or has no “story” to his matches, but even people who I respect think that Ospreay is missing something compared to the other names on that list above.
Let’s take a look at some common criticisms of Ospreay and unpack why he deserves to have his name amongst these all-time greats, and why, in my eyes, he has already surpassed them.
Will Ospreay In An All-Time Great Junior Heavyweight & Heavyweight
Ospreay is one of the few wrestlers in history to make a leap from junior heavyweight to heavyweight and be spectacular and brilliant at both while also changing his style. Some wrestlers remain in one style or division and never change. Some aren’t particularly spectacular juniors but are standout heavyweights, while some promising juniors may not translate to working a heavyweight style. Misawa might be as close as you’ll get to a universally accepted “greatest wrestler of all-time” in online circles. I don’t think most people look back too fondly on his time as Tiger Mask, and while I think he was better as a junior than people give him credit for, I think we can all agree the Misawa we know and love didn’t really begin until he threw off that mask and started feuding with Jumbo in 1990.
Will Ospreay’s catalog of great matches has plenty of bouts to choose from both from his time as a junior and his transition to heavyweight, and even amongst those divisions you can watch his evolution. As a junior, Ospreay is one of the most spectacular high flyers of all-time, bouncing all over the ring like if you threw one of those tiny rubber balls you get out of a machine you stick a quarter into within an office. While going back and watching some of his junior matches, the stuff he’s doing is still so spectacular I feel like even the best high flyers of this decade, such as the current Mascara Dorada in CMLL or Vikingo before the injuries piled up, aren’t quite as seamless as Will was from 2016-2019. Maybe Dorada or another promising young high flyer like Leon Slater can get there, but Will to me set the standard for high flyers, particularly as his match structure started to mature. Will had a lot of matches that were cool spotfests (and there’s nothing wrong or bad about having a cool spotfest when done well, but that’s a rant for another day), and they were essentially there to showcase all the mind-blowing maneuvers he and his opponent could do.
As he wrestled older veterans such as his inspiration and influence, AJ Styles, or opponents who forced a styles clash (no pun intended) such as Zack Sabre Jr. or WALTER, we can see Ospreay both starting to have a more structured match that tells a story (and not in the way a lot of people online mean in bad faith that equates to having theatrics and mid match promos instead of the action doing the talking) and working a different style of match than only just relying on spectacular high flying.
The WALTER match from OTT in 2018, in particular, is a standout, in which Ospreay isn’t flying a ton but only doing so in specific spots. The match is built around Ospreay trying to find a way to slowly wear down WALTER with strikes and takedowns and get some moments to get his signature offense in while also trying to withstand the clubbing blows and hellacious ways WALTER throws or dropkicks him around.
Ospreay’s long rivalry with fellow Brit Zack Sabre Jr. often has matches built around either Ospreay leaning into his pride to try to match Zack on the mat, see whether his dynamic offense can overcome Zack’s counters into holds, or a mixture of both of these elements. Just earlier this year, we watched Ospreay have a cage match with Kyle Fletcher in which Ospreay established at the very beginning of the match that the cage limited his ability to pull off most of his usual offense, so he resorted to having a match filled with trading blows, blood, and plunder.
Will’s transition to heavyweight made the repetition criticisms all the more baffling, because it led to Will having to change his style significantly.
Will put on a lot of size and no longer bounce around the ring as fast or often. There’s still plenty of high-flying and crazy moves in a heavyweight Ospreay match, but a lot of people will swear to you that Ospreay is still out there having the same matches he had with Ricochet every time he wrestles. Will greatly upped his striking game after he bulked up, and he chops and hits about as hard as his opponent wants to go. This man was able to get KENTA to channel his old self for one of the few times I’ve seen KENTA willing to do that in between his initial departure from NOAH and his full-time return this year. Will has some of the most brutal-looking offense in wrestling, between his signature Hidden Blade that looks like he’s knocking his opponent out with it and reviving Mitsuharu Misawa’s infamous Tiger Driver ‘91. He throws Naomichi Marufuji-inspired chops that split his opponent’s skin and gives Toshiaki Kawada’s patented face kicks to his opponents.
He kicked Kenny Omega so hard in the face in the Tokyo Dome that Kenny came out with a black eye afterwards.
He’ll still bust out a Sky Twister and run up his opponent’s chest and do a flip off of it, but he’s not out there doing a “gymnastics routine” like some would lead you to believe. Many of his old offense moves are no longer viable for him as a heavyweight, such as the 450 Splash he often used in his junior heavyweight days.
Most of his matches since becoming a heavyweight look like he survived a war, with his chest bruised up.
In many instances, since he started showing up in AEW, he’ll look like he’s been in a war zone.
Will Ospreay Is A Master of the “Carry Job”
Ospreay has the ability to get a great match out of an opponent more than any other wrestler I’ve ever seen.
“Carry job” is a term thrown around too often these days online, but Ospreay can make a very good or even average wrestler look like a million bucks, and when he’s in there with another great wrestler, he’s had plenty of all-time great matches.
To go back to the Cagematch statistics, Ospreay has 8 matches in the top 100 matches of all-time list. A lot of wrestlers have the best match of their careers with Will Ospreay.
Quick, how many BUSHI matches can you name? BUSHI is a joke of a wrestler amongst New Japan fans because, outside of his cool masks, his entire career is defined by being LIJ’s pin eater and a perennial JAG. His highest-rated singles match on Cagematch, and maybe the only truly great BUSHI singles match I can think of, is with Will Ospreay.
Shota Umino has been the butt of jokes amongst New Japan fans for a wide variety of reasons, but the biggest issue has been that he’s failed to grab the bull by the horns and become the new ace of a company that seems to really want to give him the opportunity to do so. Would it surprise you to know that his best match both on Cagematch and by a landslide in my opinion is with Will Ospreay?
That was a match I didn’t think twice about giving a full 5 stars in real time and felt like the one and only time Umino showed true fire that it felt like he had been lacking and still lacks, even as he’s having a solid G1 at the time of this writing purely based on bell to bell work.
When it comes to some of the other all-time greats listed earlier, it can be argued Ospreay has their best match ever as well. Would it be absurd to say your favorite Kenny Omega, Bryan Danielson, and Shingo Takagi matches are against Will Ospreay? Someone might disagree, but no one in their right mind would think you’re nuts for thinking that.
Going back to the diversity of Ospreay, unlike some of the other names on the list, Ospreay has gotten his work over and become a top star in promotions big or small literally all over the world. He’s wrestled and been in a marquee match in just about any noteworthy promotion in Europe, he spent a while living in Australia and helped give a surging scene an additional shot in the arm, he was a headliner on certain years on WrestleMania weekend shows, and of course, he became amongst the top mix in both the junior heavyweight and heavyweight divisions in New Japan Pro Wrestling, even main eventing a Tokyo Dome, albeit a COVID era, two night Wrestle Kingdom, but I still think that’s worth something, and he had an incredible match in that spot.
Ospreay fits AEW like a glove, having made himself a top guy in the promotion with his outstanding performances, especially on PPV, and has been involved in several of the best matches in the promotion’s history, which is now known for its tremendous high-end matches. No matter what country or promotion Will wrestles in, his style translates universally, and no matter the differences in wrestling fans’ tastes globally, they all want to see Will Ospreay have an incredible match, and he manages to deliver no matter where or who he’s facing.
While some of the other names on the list, such as Kenny Omega or Bryan Danielson, have managed to have great matches and adapt to the house style regardless of the country they’re working in, others, such as Tomohiro Ishii, just don’t have quite as consistent a hit rate outside their home promotion. I hate to pick on Misawa again, but if we stuck him or some of the other King’s Road style guys in Arena Mexico, would they be the same? They’re all-time greats, so I’m sure they could make it work, but I don’t think a Misawa epic would work in a lucha setting the same way an Ospreay epic would. I don’t think any other wrestler can feel as true to themselves, regardless of where they go, more so than Ospreay.
Does Will Ospreay’s Selling Hold Him Back?
Ospreay’s biggest criticism throughout his career has always been in regards to his selling.
At the beginning of his career, he wasn’t really interested in selling. Even around 2016, a lot of his idea of selling was based around screaming very loudly to tell the audience he was in pain versus showing it visually. I don’t even necessarily think this was a detriment to his match quality. If you’re watching Will Ospreay versus some other spectacular high flyer, do you want to see a bunch of limb work or do you want to see fireworks? From about 2017 onwards, he gradually became more nuanced at selling. When people would still criticize him for not selling during his later junior years, I think it opens up a larger philosophical question about selling in wrestling.
To many critics, it seems that the only selling point that’s acceptable to them is when it’s specifically based around a limb or other body part. If you watch something like the previously mentioned match against WALTER from OTT or the 2019 Best of the Super Juniors final against Shingo Takagi, Ospreay’s selling in those matches is based around showing the fatigue that adds up over time as he takes a beating from each of those two powerhouses. As a heavyweight, it cannot be disputed that Ospreay doesn’t sell individual body parts.
In 2022, Ospreay defended the now-defunct IWGP US Heavyweight Title against David Finlay. This entire match was built around Finlay smacking Ospreay’s hand early on with a shillelagh, and Ospreay sold it like it was broken, to the point I even questioned it a few times, and I’m a cynical wrestling fan who thinks everything is a work. Ospreay built this entire match around the fact that he couldn’t do things like throw chops or support weight with a lot of his offense because his hand was unusable. Ospreay had already become one of the best individual limb sellers in the world at that point, and he doesn’t forget to let you know about what body parts have been worked over in a match.
People may get annoyed when he only sells a limb for say, 15 seconds instead of 30, but at that point I just have to shrug my shoulders. If you’ve ever played a sport or done some sort of athletic activity, unless you completely blow out your ACL or break something, you’ll know that adrenaline can power you through finishing whatever action you’re doing and you’ll wince in pain once you’ve finished that action. Why can’t this same real world logic apply to wrestling?
The last big criticism I often hear about Ospreay that I push back on is that his matches lack emotion. Unlike some of the criticisms about him being a “flip” guy or that he can’t sell from people acting in bad faith, this one I’ve heard from people I respect. While I have heard this criticism tied into things I’ve already discussed like how Ospreay allegedly doesn’t tell stories, some people just don’t feel an emotional connection to him in the same way they do say, Kenny Omega. Honestly, I think a lot of it just boils down to not liking the guy personally.
Ospreay used to be a bit of a lightning rod for controversy in his junior heavyweight days, be it from people who didn’t like his attitude and how he carried himself or how defensive and argumentative he’d get on social media. He would take criticism very personally. There was also an incident on social media regarding Speaking Out in the UK wrestling scene. Ospreay has apologized for his past mistakes and has talked about how being ADHD and autistic led to him being rash and reactionary.
Regardless of what he says, how much he matures, or how much he apologizes, some people will never let these things go. There are active wrestlers who have done or have been accused of things much worse than Will or come off far less likeable than Will does these days, but you won’t find these issues held against their in-ring work in the same way. I don’t know Will Ospreay, and because of that I’m not here to argue over his morality or if you should like the guy as a human being, although he’s openly shown support for good causes, apologized for old social media posts, and comes off well these days.
Ultimately, Ospreay is held to a different standard than many other wrestlers because he is a prop in the wrestling culture war, and some people have dug their heels in over him to where it influences their opinions on his matches.
If you don’t like Will for whatever reason, you’re not going to live and die with him like say, Kenny Omega or Bryan Danielson, whose personas outside the ring gave them a dedicated following. Whether Ospreay has played the fiery babyface taking on the unstoppable bully that was Shingo in the BOSJ final or being a viscous heel brutalizing the plucky underdog fan favorite Michael Oku in front of Oku’s partner, Ospreay matches have never failed to generate an emotional reaction out of me, and he always is able to move the live crowds he works in front of. His 2023 match against Kenny Omega in the Tokyo Dome is one of the matches that has moved me the most, as Ospreay fought to defend his pride against the outsider who left the promotion while Ospreay stayed and gave it his all for matches in front of clap crowds.
Will Ospreay Has The Most 5-Star Matches In History
It should be noted that Will Ospreay has more 5+ star matches from Dave Meltzer than any other wrestler in history. I don’t put as much weight into this as the Cagematch ratings nowadays because “Daveflation” is a very real thing and Dave has diluted the value of his 5 star matches when he hands them out like Halloween candy at this point, but I still think it’s noteworthy. Dave’s ratings have historical value and people love to discuss and debate them for better or worse, so I felt it should be brought up.
Conclusion
I think at this point, Will Ospreay has already proved himself to be the greatest in-ring performer in the history of pro wrestling. You know what the scary part is? This man is still only 32 years old, and he’s never truly been the top guy of any company. Sure, he won the IWGP World Heavyweight Championship in 2021, but he only held the title for 46 days in COVID-restricted crowds and was forced to vacate due to a neck injury. He would already have the most impressive match resume of any wrestler in history if he decided he would retire tomorrow, but he’s still going to be around for years to come and he hasn’t even had a run with the AEW world title yet.
While many of the other names on that list from earlier are either retired or are on the decline of their career, Ospreay is still in his prime, and the list of great matches is only going to grow.
Enjoy the ride.
