*checks the calendar*
It’s September, folks. Actually, it’s the end of September, to be exact.
The NFL and NCAA are delivering football in full swing these days.
School is back in session.
For pro wrestling fans, September means one thing, above all else…
Pro Wrestling Illustrated has decided to give everyone something to argue about with their annual PWI 500 issue! For several years, I have been doing a column just like this, looking at the recently released list and doing my part to get some of those aforementioned arguments started.
If you’ve been living under multiple layers of rocks, and you have no idea what the PWI 500 is, allow me to explain.
Pro Wrestling Illustrated is a wrestling magazine that was founded back in 1979. For wrestling fans of a certain age and older, it was a thrill to head to your local newsstand, grocery store, etc, and see the latest issue of PWI available for purchase. I couldn’t tell you how much money I spent buying issues when I was younger.
Since 1991, PWI has put together their annual PWI 500, which is a list of the 500 best wrestlers in the world based on the magazine’s criteria of the previous year. Before we go any further, we have to look at that criteria, taken verbatim from PWI themselves…
Evaluation Period: August 1st, 2024 to July 31st, 2025
Criteria:
– In-Ring Achievement: W-L records, championships, tournaments won
– Influence: Visibility and prestige within a promotion and/or the industry
– Technical Ability: Quality of moves, matches, and in-ring storytelling
– Competition: Success against the most varied and highest quality opponents
– Activity: Minimum 10 singles (non-tag) matches total; or, barring this, six such matches in separate months
Note: This list prioritizes success in singles competition and in vying for heavyweight singles accolades (and, to a lesser extent, those in lower weight classes).
That is all very important information to retain when you’re looking at where people are, and aren’t ranked.
Also, I say this every year, but I have nothing to do with the rankings. Please don’t complain to me about why so-and-so isn’t ranked higher, as if I made this list myself. Whether I agree with you or not is irrelevant. Again… I didn’t make the list.
If we’re going to discuss the 2025 PWI 500, there’s no better place to start than at the very top. Cody Rhodes has taken the top spot this year. After coming in at #1 last year, as well, he becomes the eighth man to top the PWI 500 on more than one occasion, joining the following names…
– Bret “The Hitman” Hart (1993 and 1994)
– “Stone Cold” Steve Austin (1998 and 1999)
– Triple H (2000 and 2009)
– John Cena (2006, 2007, and 2013)
– Seth Rollins (2015, 2019, and 2023)
– Roman Reigns (2016 and 2022)
– Kenny Omega (2018 and 2021)
If you read that previous section, that also means Cody joins Bret Hart, Steve Austin, and John Cena as the only men to top the PWI 500 in consecutive years. He is in elite company on both of those lists.
Is he deserving of being in the top spot, though?
Look back at the criteria.
He entered the evaluation period as the Undisputed WWE Champion, and held the title for the first nine months of the period. It probably doesn’t count for much, but he defeated Gunther at Crown Jewel to win the Crown Jewel Championship. In singles competition, Cody was 11-1 on television or pay-per-view during the evaluation period, with a 16-2 overall record. I’d say that makes his In-Ring Achievement score a high one.
Influence is an easy choice for Cody. Whether you like WWE or not, they are the biggest wrestling promotion on the planet, and as the biggest star on the WWE roster, Cody has more visibility and prestige than anybody in the sport.
Technical Ability is another strong point for Cody. Is he the best technical wrestler in all of wrestling? No. Does he continue to deliver, time and time again, with good-to-great matches whenever he steps foot inside of a wrestling ring? Absolutely.
Competition is another category that helps WWE out a lot. Cody pinned the #3 name on this year’s PWI 500 (Gunther), and also pinned the #6 guy (Jey Uso). He also has multiple tag victories over the #20 name (Jacob Fatu), a pinfall victory over the #32 guy (Randy Orton), and the list goes on and on.
Activity is the only category that Cody doesn’t score very high in. He meets the minimum criteria, but he’s not one of those workhorses that wrestles on a weekly basis. He averaged one singles match per month for the evaluation period. That’s not terrible, but when you compare it to someone like, say, LA Knight, who had 33 singles matches during the evaluation period, it’s not a tremendous number.
When you put it all together, I have no problem with Cody getting the top spot. Like I said, he’s the biggest star in the biggest company, so he’s impossible to ignore.
If not Cody, is there an argument that can be made for anybody else getting the top spot in this year’s rankings?
Jon Moxley was this year’s runner-up, coming in at the #2 spot. Two months after the evaluation period began, Mox won the AEW World Title, holding it until 19 days before the period ended. He was incredibly dominant as a singles performer, with his only two singles losses during the evaluation period being the match where he lost the World Title to “Hangman” Adam Page, and then the title rematch two-and-a-half weeks later.
Unlike Cody, though, Mox was on the losing end of a bunch of tag matches. Eight of them, to be exact. He wasn’t involved in the finish of seven of those matches, and passed out in a submission for the eighth match. On the flip side, Cody’s only tag loss of the evaluation period saw his partner (Jimmy Uso) eat the pin.
I know that the criteria focuses more on singles competition, but those tag losses do play a part. The main reason I think Cody was ahead of Mox, though, is the Visibility category. When it comes to the “prestige” part of it, Mox took a big hit over the last year. A lot of people began growing tired of Mox, either because of the way he’s booked, because of the repeated use of blood and gore in his matches, and because of the constant interference from the Death Riders in his matches. Whether you agree with those opinions or not, they grew and grew and grew as Moxley’s World Title reign continued on.
An argument can be made for a few different people, but I don’t think any of the arguments are strong enough to make me change my mind. Cody is #1, and he belongs in that spot this year.
When I do my annual “review” of the PWI 500, something I like to do is take each individual criteria category, and talk about who should’ve been in the top spot if that was the ONLY criteria being used to form the rankings.
– In-Ring Achievement: It might anger some people, but Jey Uso has a strong claim for this spot. In the evaluation period, he won the Intercontinental Title for the first time, won the Royal Rumble, won the World Heavyweight Title at WrestleMania, and truly became one of the top performers on the WWE roster. While he doesn’t have the same win percentage as someone like Cody Rhodes or Jon Moxley, he still won more than enough matches to justify being in the position that WWE put him in.
– Influence: I’ve been pretty clear with my thoughts on this one already. When you’re the top star in the top company, you automatically get a lot of points in this category. It’s tough to beat WWE’s top name in this category every year. This goes to Cody Rhodes.
– Technical Ability: If you’ve been a reader of mine, you should already know the answer here. I think Will Ospreay is the best wrestler alive today, and has been for a few years now. He has the ability to work in a variety of styles, and excel at all of them.
– Competition: If you’re talking about someone who faced off with the most varied opponents, I think you can look no further than Konosuke Takeshita. He was everywhere during the evaluation period. Not only did he have his regular AEW work, but he spent time in Mexico wrestling in CMLL, working the American independent scene, and spent a bunch of time in Japan, working both DDT shows as well as New Japan’s grueling G1 Climax tournament. He traveled all over the world, working with the top names everywhere he went. It’s hard to beat that.
– Activity: If you’re looking strictly for who wrestled the most during the evaluation period, that would go to Axel Carter, out of the United Kingdom, who wrestled a whopping 220 matches in that year span. That shouldn’t even be possible, but he did it. Of those 220 matches, 114 of them saw him in singles competition, and that would be enough to get the nod here all by itself. In case you’re wondering, Axel wasn’t even ranked in the PWI 500, which seems almost criminal. It’s not even the first time that PWI has done something like that, either. For example, in the 2023 PWI 500, I had Japan’s Dragon Kid listed in this section, with 181 matches worked during the evaluation period, and like Axel Carter, he didn’t even get mentioned in that year’s PWI 500. I said it then, and I’ll say it again… cold world.
The next thing I like to discuss with the PWI 500 is who made the biggest leap, and had the biggest fall, from the previous year’s rankings.
– Biggest Rise: If you go from unranked in 2024 to #15 in 2025, that’s quite the rise. That’s the journey of CM Punk. The asterisk here, if you want to call it that, is that Punk didn’t go from “not very good” to “great” in a year’s span. He simply didn’t wrestle much in the previous evaluation period. This was the very end of his time with AEW, and then went nearly three months before signing with WWE, where he wrestled one televised match (2024 Royal Rumble match) before tearing his triceps and going on the shelf for the next six months. If you’re looking for the person who was ranked in 2024 and had the biggest rise in 2025, that would be Ricky Saints, who went up 279 spots, from #352 in 2024 to #73 this year. That was a weird one to me, because I thought Ricky was ranked way too low last year. He spent part of the evaluation period as one-half of the AEW Tag Team Champions, and while singles competition is valued higher, that still counts for something, and he was working with a lot of AEW’s top talents. Him jumping to NXT shouldn’t be enough to warrant a jump that high, even with an NXT North American Title reign. I think this was more about course correcting the mistake of ranking him too low last year. That’s just my opinion, though.
– Biggest Fall: This one goes to Samoa Joe. In 2024, he had the #11 spot. A year later, and he wasn’t even ranked. His first issue was that he missed the first six months of the evaluation period because he was off working on the Twisted Metal series. For the duration of the period, he only had four singles matches, working mostly in Trios matches. While the rankings focus more on singles action, I figured Joe would get credit for being one-third of the AEW Trios Champions for the final three-and-a-half months of the evaluation period. Apparently not. For the biggest fall of someone who was ranked on both the 2024 and 2025 lists, that goes to independent talent Rickey Shane Page, who went from #119 in 2024 to #454, a drop of 335 spots. RSP’s drop was due to him only having 15 total matches during the evaluation period, missing the final two months entirely, as well as two months at the start of 2025. Only having nine singles matches certainly didn’t help him much.
Next up, I like to give more of my own personal opinions on things, looking at some names I feel were either ranked too high or too low this year.
– Too Low: Xavier Woods. For all intents and purposes, if you’re on the WWE main roster, not only are you going to be on the PWI 500, but you’re probably going to be in a relatively high spot. It goes with being a regular performer for the biggest promotion. That’s why it was such a surprise to see Woods come in at #461 this year. He does get punished a bit by barely having any singles matches during the evaluation period, but I think he makes up for it by having success teaming with Kofi Kingston, including winning the WWE Tag Team Titles at WrestleMania. I think this was a case of focusing too much on his singles activity, and not enough on his overall body of work. I’m not saying he should’ve been in the top ten or anything, but #461 seems crazy.
– Too High: Hirooki Goto. Look… I absolutely love the story of the legendary Goto using the death of his father as fuel to go after New Japan’s top championship, a title that had eluded him for his entire career. He would shock the wrestling world by defeating Zack Sabre Jr. to become the brand new IWGP World Heavyweight Champion. It’s a beautiful story, but having him in the #5 spot is wild to me. He spent most of the first five months of the evaluation period working tag, six-man tag, and eight-man tag matches. Then, he won the New Japan Rambo at Wrestle Kingdom in January, coming out of nowhere to earn a shot at the IWGP World Heavyweight Title. After the Rambo, he went back to all the different variations of tag matches, losing just as often as he won. New Japan is one of the biggest promotions in all of wrestling, and I understand that there’s going to be a premium placed on the company’s top champion, but for someone to be so middle-of-the-road for most of the evaluation period, then to win a handful of singles matches, and getting all the way up to #5?
– Too Low: Zack Sabre Jr. If you wanted to have a New Japan name in the top five, ZSJ should’ve been the pick. He won the G1 Climax tournament at the beginning of the evaluation period, won the IWGP World Heavyweight Title two months later, held the title for four months, then won the title back a month before the period came to an end. He also had an incredibly successful WrestleMania week, going 8-0 in matches for eight different shows. Even being ranked at #13 this year, it’s too low. Like I said, ZSJ should’ve been the New Japan name to crack the top five.
– Too High: Jasper Troy. In case you were wondering how much the PWI contributors focus on wrestlers being signed to WWE contracts, look no further than this. Jasper Troy won WWE’s newest reality competition series, LFG, in March. He surfed that wave of momentum to wrestle on NXT programming five times, winning two matches (one by count-out) and losing three of them. That’s it. He still found himself ranked at #141, though. I think he has potential for a bright future, but he’s still as green as goose shit, and he barely worked enough matches to qualify for the list in the first place. There’s not a chance in hell that Jasper was the 141st best wrestler in the world during the evaluation period. Maybe it could be a possibility a couple years from now, but this year? No.
There are definitely other “too high” and “too low” names, but those are the first four that immediately jumped out at me.
Finally, I like going from the year-that-was to the year-that-is and year-that-will-be. We’ve been talking about the 2025 PWI 500, but what about the 2026 PWI 500?
Can Cody Rhodes three-peat and get the top spot again next year? If so, he would make history as the third man to top the PWI 500 three times, and the first to do it in three consecutive years. Again, I go back to the point that the top star in the top promotion carries a lot of weight in discussions like this. Three days after the 2025 evaluation period ended, Cody won the Undisputed WWE Title for the second time, and he remains the champion two months later. What if he holds the title for the entire 2026 evaluation period? How about if he holds it for a huge chunk, perhaps until WrestleMania? That pretty much guarantees him a spot in the top ten next year, and probably the top five, with the top spot being likely, as well.
Konosuke Takeshita is a name that could make the leap next year. This year, he took the #17 spot, which is the highest ranking he’s ever had in the PWI 500. After this year’s evaluation period came to an end, Takeshita would win six more singles matches to win the G1 Climax tournament, earning a future shot at the IWGP World Heavyweight Championship. What happens if he wins New Japan’s biggest title at New Japan’s biggest show of the calendar year? There’s also a not-so-far-fetched scenario where Takeshita wins both the IWGP World Heavyweight Title and the AEW World Title during the evaluation period. What if he wins them both? How about if he wins them and holds them at the same time? I think that would be enough to topple Cody Rhodes, or anyone else on the WWE roster, for the top spot.
To continue with the “PWI 500 history” discussion, what about Seth Rollins? He won WWE’s World Heavyweight Title two days after the evaluation period ended, and he has a chance to have the title in his possession for a lengthy period of time. If he does that, could he become the first man to top the PWI 500 on four separate occasions?
Now, it’s your turn. What are your thoughts on this year’s PWI 500? Did Cody Rhodes deserve the top spot? Who do you think was ranked too low this year? What about too high? Who are some people you think have a good shot of being in the top spot next year? I just want to know your thoughts on the PWI 500 in general. As always, feel free to hit me up in the comments section below, on Twitter (@HustleTheSavage), or on Bluesky (@aaronhyden.bsky.social), and let me know what’s on your mind.
Now, let’s get to my Weekly Power Rankings before closing things out with the list of songs I was listening to as I put this column together.
Weekly Power Rankings
“I Quit” Match Participants: There have been a ton of “I Quit” Matches in pro wrestling history. It’s a tried and true stipulation for heated, personal feuds. AEW might have something special on their hands with the upcoming “I Quit” Match at the WrestleDream pay-per-view. Darby Allin, who is someone that I can’t picture ever saying the two special words, will be taking on Jon Moxley… who is someone that I can’t picture ever saying the two special words. That’s the kind of pairing you want for a stipulation like this. Those two are going to have a battle that I don’t think the wrestling world is truly prepared for.
Je’Von Evans vs Josh Briggs: A really good “little man vs big man” match, with the much larger and stronger Briggs trying to play “bully ball” and slow the pace down, while Je’Von tried to defy gravity like very few on the planet can do better than him. There was a ton of back-and-forth action and some very believable near falls that had the crowd biting every single time. Je’Von has the potential to be a HUGE star for the company, and I mean much sooner than later.
Oba Femi vs Ricky Saints: Oba is great at looking physically dominant. Ricky Saints is great at taking an ass whooping and continuing to fight back. Put them together, and it’s a recipe for success. Even in dropping the NXT Championship, Oba looked like an absolute monster, and now, the countdown to his move up to Raw or Smackdown is officially on. The Ricky Saints Era is upon us, and it should be fun to see the man finally get a chance to be THE guy somewhere.
Rhea Ripley vs Asuka: When the women of WWE are given a bunch of time to work with, you can bet that something great is coming. That was the case here. These two had a really entertaining, physical match, and then we got the post-match attack from Asuka and the official heel turn that has been teased for a while now. She’s fun to cheer for, but she does her best work as a heel, so this is a welcome change.
Brodido vs Gates Of Agony: I like that Bishop Kaun and Toa Liona have been built up in a more serious fashion than any other time since they’ve been involved with AEW and AEW’s version of Ring Of Honor. Will it lead to anything in the end? Probably not, but that’s Tony Khan’s fault, and not their doing. For now, I’ll enjoy their mini-push and the fun matches that it has given us.
Sami Zayn vs Je’Von Evans: As soon as we saw Sami interacting with Je’Von on NXT, I knew that Je’Von would be one of Sami’s next challengers in the United States Title Open Challenge series. Sure enough, that’s what we got. Sami continues to be red hot in the series, and I might have to write a column about some names I’m looking forward to seeing him face in future open challenge matches.
Kyle Fletcher vs Komander: Fletcher needed a good “bounce back” win after coming up short in his attempt to win the AEW World Title, and he got it here. He continues to look like someone that is primed for huge things in the future.
“Hangman” Adam Page vs Lee Moriarty: There was never going to be a chance that Moriarty won this match to become the new AEW World Champion, but hey, this got him on AEW television and he looked great during his opportunity. I’ll take it.
Bayley vs Roxanne Perez: Round and round, the “crazy Bayley” storyline goes. Where it stops? Nobody knows. It’s still a little weird, but if we can get more good matches like this, it becomes a lot more tolerable.
Powerhouse Hobbs vs Claudio Castagnoli: Two big, bad dudes trying to out-big, out-bad, and out-dude each other. What’s not to like?
Oba Femi vs Trick Williams: They were having a match that was building quite nicely until it took a backseat to the TNA “invasion” of NXT. Both men are proving that they belong in the conversation of who should be the next main roster call-up.
Penta & The War Raiders vs The New Day & Grayson Waller: Tons of action from bell-to-bell, and all six men busted their asses. Sometimes, you don’t need much more than that.
Tiffany Stratton vs Jade Cargill vs Nia Jax: They were having a really fun match until… well… you know what happened. It’s a shame, because the botched finish is all anybody will remember from this. That, and Jade Cargill getting busted open the hard way and having her eyebrow split wide open. Â As for the botch itself, it sure looked like Nia Jax was responsible, but then the same argument always comes up. Is Nia to blame for not remembering to kick out, or is it the Referee’s fault for not going for the “shoot” count? It would be one thing if we were talking about Jade covering Nia, and Daphanie LaShunn wanting to prevent a three count that would’ve given the title to Jade and screwing up the planned match result. Tiffany was the one going for the pin, and she won the match, anyway, so what harm would it have done to just count the three?
This Week’s Playlist: “I See How It Is” by The Starting Line… “Sense Of Humor” by The Starting Line… “Circulate” by The Starting Line… “Curveball” by The Starting Line… “Bloodlust” by Dayseeker… “Echoes” by Versus Me… “On The Hotline” by Pretty Ricky… “Love vs Money: Pt. 2” by The Dream… “U Don’t Have To Call” by Usher… “Wifey” by Next… “After Party” by Koffee Brown… “Player’s Prayer” by Lloyd… “Why Don’t We Fall In Love” by Amerie… “I Gotta Be” by Jagged Edge… “Wednesday Lover” by Jagged Edge… “Funny How” by Jagged Edge… “The Way That You Talk” by Jagged Edge, Jermaine Dupri & Da Brat… “The Rest Of Our Lives” by Jagged Edge… “Without You” by Jagged Edge… “Rings” by Aesop Rock… “River” by Bishop Briggs… “Teenage Love” by Slick Rick… “Luchini” by Camp Lo… “Break Ya Neck” by Busta Rhymes… “Ribbon In The Sky” by Intro… “Cutie Pie” by One Way… “Love Light In Flight” by Stevie Wonder… “Ain’t Nobody” by Chaka Khan… “And The Beat Goes Down” by The Whispers… “The Payback” by James Brown
