Who is The Best Wrestler In The World (at this current moment in time)?

[Supremo]

Wild to use Hangman Adam Page and Will Ospreay as examples of guys who can’t go everywhere and still get over when we’ve literally watched them both do just that.

Hangman cutting promos in Spanish and having Arena Mexico hang on his every word. Will Ospreay being one of the biggest surprises of all time by becoming one of the best North American promo guys.

Honestly, in 2025, right now, I don’t think there are many better examples of guys who can do it all and get over anywhere, doing any style.

[BomberPat]

Logan Paul would be disqualified for being shit, not because he can't work multiple styles.

You can teach someone to wrestle one match far more easily than you can teach someone to wrestle. Everything I see from Paul suggests that he has learned, by rote, the match he is working. That's the advantage of being able to go months between matches, and to give him some credit, that's all that is asked of him in the job that he is doing.

But there's no substance to it. No fundamentals, no understanding of the how or the why. I would be morbidly interested to see him work a match that fell apart, or work with a language barrier, or a last minute substitute opponent, because all my money would be on him not being able to. Again, fair enough, that's not his job. But it also means he should be nowhere near any conversation about being the best in the world.

 

Personally, I dislike questions of "best" anyway. How do you compare a great deathmatch brawler to a WWE headliner to a lucha flyer to a brilliant comedy wrestler? I think the only arguments you can make, beyond who makes the most money, are longevity, adaptability, and who can have the best matches with the widest range of opponents, in the most different environments. It's why I don't buy into the idea of Triple H as an all-time great - bar maybe Ronda Rousey, he was nobody's best match. 

In terms of that diversity and adaptability, Moxley has to be in the conversation - not many people are equally adept at scuzzy CZW deathmatches and WWE PPV main events - but it's hard to argue against Ospreay; even if his style isn't particularly my favourite style, I think he's better at that style than anyone else is at theirs.

[Snitsky's back acne]

1 hour ago, Jesse said:

What's the thinking behind Page struggling to get over in lucha? He can speak the language decently and from my understanding they've always loved a big lad who can brawl and bleed.
 

Didn't know he could speak Spanish. A massive plus. Definitely puts him back as a contender then. 

[Statto]

Any excuse...

I reckon we'll get the chance to find out if he can get over in lucha (he will) given that and the relationship between AEW & CMLL. I'd not be surprised if he takes MJF's CMLL belt off him and returns it to Mexico.

 

[Devon Malcolm]

Logan Paul's not shit but he's also not the best in the world. He's a long way from both these.

He is a massive cunt and I'm sure we can all agree on this.

[gmoney]

3 hours ago, Snitsky's back acne said:

He pointed out that if The Rock went to the MMA-influenced (at the time) New Japan and ultra stiff All Japan he would get laughed out of the building and thus, this disqualified him from being the best.

 

Ah, so that's where this idiotic opinion originates! Heard it a few times from morons, I didn't realise dull bollocks came out with it. 

Edited August 31, 2025 by gmoney

[Merzbow]

Every Logan Paul match I've seen has been  homogenous slop, the worst culprit of WWE's overproduced style. 

If generative AI made up a wrestling style.

[Snitsky's back acne]

1 hour ago, gmoney said:

Ah, so that's where this idiotic opinion originates! Heard it a few times from morons, I didn't realise dull bollocks came out with it. 

Who hurt you? 

[Handsome Tex Hardcastle]

It's difficult to separate any assessment of Logan Paul from his schedule. It gives him the time and space to prepare for these "set piece" matches, and in all fairness he's exceptionally good at what he's been doing. It's also one of the reasons he's having to work this way though. He didn't spend any meaningful time away from the big stage honing his craft before arriving, and now he's there he isn't working week after week to develop those fundamentals slowly over time. As good as a lot of his work is you can see the gaps, and he isnt going to improve on these areas unless he does it the old fashioned way. 

The other issue he has is that its going to be difficult at this stage to get that experience even if his schedule allowed it. Part of his deal is that he's a naturally gifted phenomenon that's learned exceptionally quickly and is able to hang with the best despite minimal training. His story now is one of continued improvement and taking things to the next level. If he started working a typical schedule to learn the basics and fundamentals he'd get the seasoning he needs, but it also risks exposing him. Everyone that arrives in WWE needs to hit the ground running nowadays, but Paul moreso than anyone can't afford to have a series of bad matches even if they are important learning experiences. I do wonder to what extent a curtailed house show schedule will impact the overall standard a few years down the line. 

[LaGoosh]

10 hours ago, Handsome Tex Hardcastle said:

Part of his deal is that he's a naturally gifted phenomenon that's learned exceptionally quickly and is able to hang with the best despite minimal training.

Not trying to be a smart arse but I don't even know why WWE would want to present a YouTube guy as being on the same level as any of their top guys. WWE stars are supposed to be real life superheroes aren't they?

There's a place for celebrity wrestling matches but to me it should be more Zayn/Knoxville and Mayweather/Big Show than some guy going toe to toe with Roman Reigns. But that's just me.

[organizedkaos]

The Logan Paul thing is a bit like suggesting one of Sean Baker's leads (lets say the lady from Florida Project) is in contention for best actor in the world. 

Using very specific circumstances tying into the nature of his films, his direction & creative stly eand her talents she gave an absolutely incredible performance. However trying to extrapolate the fact she gave that performance into the idea she could be a versatile working actor is not really considering the situation around the work. It's possible she could but there's no evidence of range beyond creating something exceptional within an artistic environment designed for her to create something exceptional. 

[BomberPat]

41 minutes ago, LaGoosh said:

Not trying to be a smart arse but I don't even know why WWE would want to present a YouTube guy as being on the same level as any of their top guys. WWE stars are supposed to be real life superheroes aren't they?

There's a place for celebrity wrestling matches but to me it should be more Zayn/Knoxville and Mayweather/Big Show than some guy going toe to toe with Roman Reigns. But that's just me.

100% agreed on this. There's a reason why Andy Kaufman was the greatest celebrity wrestler ever, and it's because he knew that his job was to look completely out of his depth once they actually got in the ring - it showed that the wrestlers were good at what they did, and you couldn't just let anyone in there, while also giving the satisfaction of seeing the mouthy New York celebrity get his comeuppance for everything he'd been saying about Memphis.

When it comes to athletes from other sports, the story should always be that they're very good at one thing, while the wrestlers are good at theirs. Mayweather/Big Show worked brilliantly because it was explicitly a boxer vs. a wrestler, and it succeeded for one of the same reasons that Cody/Ogogo didn't work in AEW - in that match, they went too quickly to Ogogo just wrestling like a wrestler, and that killed the uniqueness and the intrigue around both him and the match. It also helped that Mayweather worked heel.

 

I think the problem now is that WWE want to seem cool, and they want the publicity that comes from booking celebrities, and generally the way to pander celebrities is to present them as cool bad-asses. Even with Logan Paul as a heel, he has to be doing flashy moves and impressive stuff, he probably wouldn't be there if they wanted to book him like Kaufman. And as good as Bad Bunny was, there's a fine line between presenting him as someone who's surprisingly good at wrestling for someone who hadn't done it before, and as someone who can legitimately hang with a WWE wrestler.

But I don't think they're going to get many celebrities in who are prepared to just be a dickhead heel and then get beaten up at the end of it - and any who do, would likely still want to be kind of a cool heel, or do it all a bit tongue-in-cheek, or else immediately start going on podcasts and talking about how much fun it was. It's a lot to ask for anyone to have the commitment of Andy Kaufman, though!

It's maybe an old-fashioned view, but I think any outsider should always be shown to not be as good as a full-time professional wrestler. They can bring other skills to the table - the Knoxville match was a perfect silly example of that - and outsmart or beat wrestlers in other ways, but they shouldn't be getting the better of them at wrestling. Logan Paul is in an odd spot, though, where he's effectively just a member of the roster now, and I don't know how much his celebrity is getting any additional eyes on the show.

Edited September 1, 2025 by BomberPat

[Devon Malcolm]

20 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

Even with Logan Paul as a heel, he has to be doing flashy moves and impressive stuff, he probably wouldn't be there if they wanted to book him like Kaufman.

But that's just modern wrestling, isn't it? Everyone keeps doing the same moves when they switch heel. I don't watch AEW but I'm assuming Ricochet isn't working like Tully Blanchard now.

And he is a really good heel. He's one of the few I've seen in the last 20 years who actually seems to have made an effort to get crowds to react negatively to him. Almost nobody makes that effort anymore except maybe in a promo insulting the local sports team or something. During matches he made the effort to wind the crowd up so while he was doing flips and that, he counteracted that by mugging them off. He gets it.

I don't disagree that he shouldn't have been going toe-to-toe with Roman Reigns but cheating to win against Rey Mysterio and LA Knight and the like, that's mostly how he was being booked when I saw him.

[The Gaffer]

Logan Paul's obviously very good at what he does, but it's blindingly obvious to me that his inclusion in this thread is somewhere between trolling and genuineness: It's coming up with a dead clever, outside the box, controversial submission and then convincing yourself you believe in it. 

[BomberPat]

1 hour ago, Devon Malcolm said:

But that's just modern wrestling, isn't it? Everyone keeps doing the same moves when they switch heel. I don't watch AEW but I'm assuming Ricochet isn't working like Tully Blanchard now.

I wouldn't have believed it if you'd told me he had this in him a couple of years ago, but Ricochet has become a fantastic heel in a way that very few American wrestlers manage - he works the early part of the match as an arrogant prick, is then made to look foolish (usually by babyfaces slapping him on the top of his head), and from then on becomes more aggressive. It's the formula that a lot of old British heels used, effectively, even if he is doing a bunch of flips during the match.

There are ways to make flashy, athletic moves heelish. PAC is pretty much unmatched in terms of slowing things down right before hitting a flippy move, so he's still bringing the pace down the way a heel should, and as a result he manages to make the resulting move feel much more vicious and deliberate. The old adage is that babyfaces move forward while heels move backward, or babyfaces speed up while heels slow down, and I think that's much more important than what individual moves someone does. The other way to make flashy, flippy moves a heel trait is to hammer home that it's someone just showing off - a lot of the Young Bucks stuff is like that; a ton of cartwheels and flips in moves that don't need them, purely to show off that they can do it, and to piss off the people who criticise them. 

I've not seen enough of Logan Paul recently to know how good he is as that side of things. I appreciate that he at least tries to get heat, which is something that nobody in WWE does - one of my biggest problems with their product is that their heels don't wrestle like heels, they don't cheat unless it's the finish, and even then half the time the babyface is just as likely to do it, and nobody tries to build any actual heat or tension. But my point about him doing big flashy moves was less about him as a heel, and more about him as a celebrity - I don't think you get a Logan Paul to give wrestling a go unless he's "allowed" to do all the cool stuff, when a much more satisfying use of a widely disliked celebrity YouTuber would be to talk himself into a beating a la Andy Kaufman, and for that to be the pay-off. The more he's just a wrestler, the less novelty there is in him being a celebrity, and the less impressive other wrestlers look when a YouTuber can show up and do their job - it's kind of like the Shane McMahon problem; it was alright for him to take these big mad bumps every time he showed up, because he'd have six months off before his next match, but it raises expectations for other wrestlers who have to show up for work the next day too.