highflyflow

Anyway, Adam Priest is a phenomenal pro wrestler, one of my favorites over the past three years. Not to compare them style-wise or even quality wise, but he has a Jim Breaks like approach to his matches when wrestling as a heel: he could outwrestle his opponents, but he’s too busy whining and throwing fits. Very very good as a babyface as well, so add that in for versatility. Wouldn’t consider him yet due to lack of longevity but he’s definitely a guy I could see being a major player in 2026, especially when Tony Khan inevitably signs him to a long-term contract.

If you ignore the contextualization for that relatively low ranking as well as the other, broader pool that has him much higher, then sure I could see that. Doesn’t change the fact that there are plenty of people that consider him one of, if not the best wrestler in the world.

On Voices of Wrestling’s list of top 50 wrestlers of 2025, Adam Priest ranked #40, additionally impressive considering his brand of professional wrestling does not normally mesh with the tastes of that specific site. In the 2024 VP100, Adam Priest ranked 15th, making 58 out of 84 ballots and outranking prominent names like Swerve Strickland, Will Ospreay and Gunther. He will probably finish just as high if not higher in 2025’s iteration, which rolls out next month.

We should absolutely nominate and vote for the best wrestlers ever based on attendance numbers, I agree.

Already nominated. https://forums.prowrestlingonly.com/topic/56217-cody-rhodes/

Just as input is super important to you, output is super important to me (as is input, to be clear!), and while I think it's a crowning achievement for Bret that he was able to have the amount of great matches he had in the environment that he did, it doesn't necessarily move me when I compare him to upper tier guys. That stuff is while he'll coast into my top 30 with ease, but it doesn't help his chances of cracking my top 10. To draw a comparison that's probably more favorable to you than the standard Pillars or Flair ones: is it more impressive that Bret at his peak was having great matches with Diesel and Backlund and post-peak Hennig than Aja was with peak Hokuto, Toyota, Bull, Kansai, etc? Probably, yeah, but Aja's output simply dwarfs Bret's to me, and I wouldn't even say he stands head and shoulders above Aja as an input candidate or even above her at all really, so I feel comfortable saying she's at minimum a top 10 wrestler ever while Bret's in that next tier or two down.

I've seen a decent amount of people say that Bret is in their top 10, or even their #1, and I still have yet to really understand why. Don't get me wrong, it's not for lack of enthusiasm towards him; he's probably one of my top 5 favorite wrestlers ever, but I can't really see him that high. He's like a perfect ideal of an input candidate, always offering thoughtful touches to his matches, great offense and selling and the like. However, the output, while great, leaves a little to be desired when you compare him to the very top tier guys, and he's obviously hurt by longevity. These are both understandable, the former of which due to the environments he worked in and the latter by his unfortunately premature retirement, but all the same they do stand as significant enough criticisms in my mind that I don't feel comfortable ranking him quite that high, despite having a deep love and admiration for his work. I am willing to be swayed, though, so does anyone have a good argument for Bret? Is there any Hart Foundation tags or Stampede work I'm missing that boosts his case so significantly?

I understand why his stock is down, and I promise I'm not commenting due to recency bias from his recent match with AJ Styles a couple days ago, but I really do feel like Nakamura's case might be getting overlooked. The WWE run is largely not great, but it's not like there aren't gems to be found in there, and I think his peak work in New Japan truly is as great now as it was in 2016 when he got on the list. I'm not as familiar with his 2000s work as Tanahashi's, but I love their series going back to early 2008 and I could see him getting boosted by a critical re-examination of that early run. If I vote for Nak, it'll be on the fringes since his last 10 years have been what they've been, but I do think he's worthy of discussion still.

Been going through Tanahashi's career for the last several months. I'm still in 2011 now, so I don't have a complete enough picture yet to make a concrete projection on where he'll end up for me, but needless to say it will be extraordinarily high, for the reasons provided above. Just such a compelling and intelligent performer that consistently gets me invested in his matches through his attention to detail, both within the match in a vacuum as well as in telling stories across a series of matches or sometimes a year or even multiple years as a whole. Great matches 22 years apart (2004 and 2026), with plenty in between. A defining worker of a generation who practically molded an entire group of highly acclaimed workers from the ground up.

Roddy is one of the first guys I think of when I think of the process of comparing wrestlers across eraS for this exercise. For example: Ted DiBiase finished at 42 in 2016, no doubt a beneficiary of so the 80s Mid-South set and some heavy pimping in his and other nominee forums. DiBiase retired at the age of 39 after a very respectable 19-year career, and the bulk of his case comes from a 4-5 year window in the mid-80s, primarily his Mid-South work but adding in some of his All Japan stuff and some strong title matches with Savage in the WWF. Not many people are making the case that DiBiase's run as the Million Dollar Man adds much to his GWE case, which is how he spent the last 7 years of his career. Strong, on the other hand, is 42 years old, 25 years into his career, has been, at worst a good but generic/flawed worker and, at best, one of if not the best wrestler on the planet, for 20 of those years, has shown he's still one of the best guys in the world in AEW the last two years, and has shown no signs of slowing down. I know DiBiase is probably a bit of low-hanging fruit, but Strong's resume just looks so much more impressive to me there, and that's against a guy that cracked the top 50 last time! It's that kind of logic that makes it easy for me to put more modern guys above wrestlers that have been hyped for decades, but I wonder how everyone else feels about it.

Yeah I was gonna say the same thing but didn’t really feel like fleshing out an argument. I think if you widen the scope to maybe 15 years it’s a much more representative sample size; perhaps even 10 years, with the obvious capacity for greatness afterwards (Misawa would benefit from this).

I really just have never bought the idea that Flair's had "15 years of crap" or any kind of detracting statement in regards to the twilight years of his active career; the idea that his WWE run is considered a negative for him, and a strong negative at that, is baffling to me, because I consider him to be a reliably solid member of the Ruthless Aggression era and honestly one of the better wrestlers on the roster period. I guess if you compared Flair in 2005 to Flair in 1985 then he doesn't stack up in comparison but...why would you do that? Flair at 56 is not gonna look the same as Flair at 36. I still think he had matches ranging from solid to genuinely great with the likes of Eddie Guerrero, Randy Orton, Chris Benoit, Shawn Michaels, Big Show, Mick Foley, and Triple H.

If I was a betting man, I’d put money on Danielson, Funk, Hansen, Tenryu and Kobashi to all finish above Flair. After that, though, is anyone’s guess.

The former, I was directly quoting @El McKell's post. To be clear, I understand that plenty of people love this stuff, but I really don't have much use for a deeply flawed wrestler perpetuating a deeply flawed style and being considered the best of the bunch in one of the weaker decades for wrestling in recent memory.

What’s the use of being the absolute best at a style that’s amongst the most aggravating in wrestling today?

A lot of talk revolving around this project since 2014 has been about "great match theory", or how much one values great matches in the context of this discussion. I certainly value great matches a lot, but I've been thinking about this for a while and, to me, there's just more to being one of the 100 greatest wrestlers of all time than having great matches. I've been thinking about John Cena's dud of a retirement run this year, and while one could definitely hand-wave it as insignificant in the vast scope of his career, to me it really is significant. For one, he's been in positions of prominence all year, and failed spectacularly, but for two it's how he's failed that reflects on him as a potential great. Additionally, something like the report that he's pushed for his retirement match to open SNME this weekend (which could absolutely be bullshit, to be fair) is something I also hold against him, as someone in his position of power should understand that he'd be cutting the nuts off all the younger, less over talent than him that have to follow the match the company's been building to for a calendar year. But moving moreso into explicit criteria, I value the things that make a wrestler stand out in my head. How they walk to the ring, how they take to being a babyface or heel, how they approach different kinds of matches, their attention to detail, the way they structure matches, etc. It's not exactly a Matt D-esque holistic view of wrestling, but it leans more in that direction than staring at how many 4+ star matches they have in my spreadsheet.

I like Eddie in early 2010s PWG, but not nearly enough to consider him for a list like this

His title match vs. Higuchi might be my MOTY, I think it’s that good. Hell, as far as this topic goes, Higuchi should be getting good buzz given how great he’s been especially in the 2020s, but I’m not optimistic about that. There’s always 2036, I guess

I’ll have Panther in my top 50. He’s been one of the best wrestlers in the world, in the best promotion in the world, for at least two years now, in his 60s. In a similar vein, does Akiyama climb into the teens this time around? He’s demonstrably added to his case in the last ten years

In 2016, wrestlers like Shinsuke Nakamura, Hiroshi Tanahashi, CM Punk, and Bryan Danielson all made it on the top 100 list based predominantly on their work in the ten years since the Smarkschoice poll. Who do you think will be the biggest benefactor of footage from the last 10 years in the 2026 list? Mostly asking for wrestlers that weren't on the list last time, but you think have a good chance at being on next year.

I think the Tamura point is interesting, because while there isn't really a traditional heel/face divide in shoot-style, I do think there are angles by which you can see him as the protagonist and antagonist of matches (for instance, for the case of the latter, I think of his 97-99 matches with Kohsaka and Yamamoto). Anyway, as far as wrestlers that I love both as a face and heel (or tecnico and rudo, for the luchadors): Danielson, Funk, Flair, Kawada, Austin, Panther, Styles, Tanahashi, Satanico, Piper, Bret, Otani, Punk, Windham, Savage, Zbyszko, Akiyama, Moxley, Christian, Hokuto. I'm sure there are plenty I'm forgetting, and I know someone like Buddy Rose is missing simply because I haven't seen his babyface work yet.

GOAT Contenders (all wrestlers I think I could realistically see voting at #1; doesn't necessarily mean they will be my 1-10): Aja Kong Bryan Danielon El Hijo del Santo Genichiro Tenryu Kenta Kobashi Mitsuharu Misawa Ric Flair Shinya Hashimoto Terry Funk Yoshiaki Fujiwara Wrestlers who could potentially crack my top 10: AJ Styles Akira Hokuto Buddy Rose Chigusa Nagayo Devil Masami El Satanico Hiroshi Tanahashi Jaguar Yokota Jumbo Tsuruta Jun Akiyama Jushin Liger Kiyoshi Tamura Negro Casas Nick Bockwinkel Rey Mysterio Jr. Stan Hansen Tatsumi Fujinami Toshiaki Kawada Vader Yuki Ishikawa

Is that really such a wild take? It got a #1 vote in the GME poll this year, and landed in the top 200 overall.

Honestly did not expect this thread to be so negative post-2016. It's interesting, because on other corners of the internet, I've seen Punk talked up as a legitimate #1 contender or at bare minimum top 10, and that just hasn't seemed to translate to this thread. I wonder if those people will end up submitting a ballot next year, and how that'll affect his ranking on the overall list. Anyway, Punk will make my list, somewhere between 40-75, for all the reasons (both positive and negative) listed here. Where do people stand on CM Punk, post-AEW and in the midst of his second WWE stint? Has his comeback work helped or hurt his case to you? I love a lot of his AEW run, especially the Last Dance 2023 stuff up to and including the final Joe match, but I'm mostly ambivalent to the current WWE work.

Save Fujiwara, Tamura will be my highest ranked shoot-stylist. Unbelievable combination of athleticism and skill, and brings a certain character that's so easy for me to connect with in these shoot style matches, whether it be the cocky underdog in Takada's UWFi, the prodigy in the first year in RINGS, or the established ace against underdogs like Yamamoto in those peak 97-99 years. Unreal how good he looks early in his career, too; I think the 1992 Yoji Anjo match is a legitimate classic, and I wouldn't be mad if someone said that wasn't even his best work in UWFi. Top 20 contender