AEW All Out 2026 Discussion

[RedTwoster]

2 minutes ago, TheBurningRed said:

Best Okada match in AEW? I laughed when Ciampa said it was a dream match that everyone wanted. But they exceeded my expectations. A really great match. Okada is the best at doing a closing stretch. Tied between this match and the Trios match for match of the night. I loved the Hangman and Swerve interactions. I think what makes their rivalry so special is that they haven’t overdone it. They’ve had their feud, not hundreds of matches, but it’s always there, ready to go again.   

It was excellent, but definitely not in my opinion - his matches with Takeshita and in particular the triple threat with Dorada were significantly better and the tag matches against Brodido also come to mind but I’m sure there are others I’d rank above it, as good as it was. Okada often gets a bad rap for not being what he once was, and while I’ve not seen his Japanese stuff, if there has been a decline it can only have been from exceptional to superb.

[IANdrewDiceClay]

Apparently it was Dustin Rhodes who agented the match. If this was anywhere else, questions would be asked for allowing someone with 36 matches under his belt do something that dangerous. But as @herbie747 said on his interview with Alan4L years ago "its wrestling, nobody ever learns anything."

[Supremo]

Depressingly likely they tried to run the spot past Dustin but he was too distracted looking at photographs of guns on Twitter.

Edited yesterday at 07:25 PM by Supremo

[CTXRussomark]

13 minutes ago, IANdrewDiceClay said:

Apparently it was Dustin Rhodes who agented the match. If this was anywhere else, questions would be asked for allowing someone with 36 matches under his belt do something that dangerous. But as @herbie747 said on his interview with Alan4L years ago "its wrestling, nobody ever learns anything."

Wasn't it Dustin who got disciplined/sacked from WWE for letting someone do something dangerous in a match he was agenting?  I have vague memories of some sort of incident, though I may be mixing him up with someone else. 

[AshC]

I'm sure the man who wanted a boob job for his gimmick has completely sound judgment. 

[Doog]

Good show, could've been improved by a bit better maych placement, but its one of those PPVs that if you watched it it was entertaining, but if you didnt you didnt really miss much. Aside from the Bucks winning the tag belts there was nothing majorly newsworthy.

Pac/Andrade is a good match, but didnt really start the PPV hot, tag titles going here would've got it off to a proper hot start.

Obviously can't plan for the Borden injury, but from that to Persephone and the open challenge was a tough watch, if id been watching live id have been fast off by this point.

Thankfully from there, and especially from the Brawling Birds match onwards it really picked up and it ended fairly hot.

Ospreay/Okada already confirmed for Grand Slam Paris so I expect Dynamite this week to be more of a placeholder/lead in to that show but maybe we'll get some developments, Death Riders related or something else, no idea what the WrestleDream card will look like and its only 3 weeks away so theyll be moving quickly.

But yeah, enjoyable if not all that newsworthy.

[herbie747]

2 hours ago, IANdrewDiceClay said:

Apparently it was Dustin Rhodes who agented the match. If this was anywhere else, questions would be asked for allowing someone with 36 matches under his belt do something that dangerous. But as @herbie747 said on his interview with Alan4L years ago "its wrestling, nobody ever learns anything."

 

[RIDDUM_N_STYLE]

Enjoyed the show, like I do every PPV, but like others have said, the spot that Steven Borden got injured from took me right out of it for a good hour. Absolutely terrifying seeing his hand go like that, thankfully by the end of the show he was conscious and speaking so he hopefully won’t miss too much time out. Really great hearing in the aftermath the views of Taz and Excalibur of their experiences of in ring injuries to help ease the fears of the home audience

[digforvictory]

I thought Taz especially was excellent with the scary Borden injury. He seemed the first one to realise something was wrong, and then afterwards him speaking to camera about how safety comes first and relaying his own experiences with serious injuries was really helpful. 

Horrible situation and Borden shouldn't be doing spots like that anyway but I thought AEW handled the aftermath about as well as you could possibly expect. It's a relief it sounds like he's going to be ok.

I enjoyed the show a lot, the standards for AEW PPV's are so high and it was always going to be near impossible to match up to All In but I still thought it was a very good show. I thought Okada vs Ciampa was match of the night, Ciampa has totally proved me wrong. When it was announced he'd signed I was completely underwhelmed, I think the horrible NXT one final beat match or whatever it was called totally soured him on me.

But he's been great in AEW, he's had fantastic match after fantastic match. He's been a brilliant signing. 

Favourite moment of the night was seeing the crowd go wild anytime Hangman and Swerve interacted. They don't want to overdo it but they are a pairing that you can go back to at any time and the crowd will just lose their shit, it's a really special all timer rivalry.  

I'm not as down on the main event as some seem to be but I really really hope that's the last multi man run in, ref bump Death Rider AEW PPV main event we ever get. If this was them killing that off then fine, but please no more. 

 

 

Edited yesterday at 11:10 PM by digforvictory

[BomberPat]

it feels weird to be talking about this show after the news about PAC.

I thought it was that weird AEW phenomenon of being generally really good, but totally inessential. Nothing that happened on this show felt like it has any long-term impact or will matter all that much by the end of the year.

PAC vs. Andrade was fantastic, the Trios match was great fun, and Okada vs. Ciampa managed to be absolutely brilliant in spite of being set up to fail by being absurdly presented as a dream match.

Top end of the card I thought was a slog. The Ladder match had its moments, but there was very little to it that won't just blur into every other big ladder match spot of the last few years. I largely hated the main event. The Death Riders/Ospreay storyline is so bogged down with ideas never explored to fruition and "tell don't show" bullshit that the dynamic is a mess, no part of the story felt like it was satisfactorily concluded, and "Will Ospreay beats the guy who broke his neck" was barely even a factor in the story they were telling, which is just a complete failure in my eyes. I love an overbooked schmozz, and it was too overbooked for my tastes, just far too busy for far too little reward.

What's more frustrating is that it's a Champion vs. Champion match, and because of the mess of the story, that just didn't matter. That should be an exceptional main event, but AEW do them so often it's just a non-factor. There was one line in a promo about how Mox wouldn't have the advantage because there wasn't a 20 minute time limit, but Mox has already had two title defences this year where they got rid of the 20 minute time limit for Continental rules anyway! Moxley has had the Continental Title since December 2025, he won a tournament to win it, he won another tournament to defend it, he's presumably going into a third tournament to defend it again in November, he's beaten all-comers in that time - I don't know who it helps to have him lose to a different champion. Maybe if the story was that he's going to lose in the C2 because losing to Will has knocked his confidence, but that explicitly wasn't the story they told - they went with "Moxley accepts his fate". And to make matters worse, Ospreay's next challenger is Okada, and he has Andrade waiting in the wings - they're having the World Champion beat every other singles champion, and that's not even the storyline.

The Steve Borden stuff is such a bad luck moment. He shouldn't have been doing it this early in his career, and the blame sits with the agent, but there's also a reputational thing with Darby Allin - I think Darby is likely smart and self-aware enough to not be asking other people to do the kind of big stunts he does, but the moment you make it explicit that the daredevil who doesn't care about his own safety is the mentor to the green young rookie, every time that rookie takes a risk there's going to be a spotlight on Darby. My gut instinct is that it's probably a spot they ran through in training a dozen times, nailed it every time, and then it just went wrong on the night because even when you think you've got it nailed, you haven't factored in the impact of the adrenaline of working in front of a crowd, the fatigue of doing it deep into a match, the ropes being looser or damper than you expect, all these other factors.

[Supremo]

Second half of this show was really good.

Three-way ladder match was tonnes of fun. God bless Nick Jackson and Cash Wheeler. What a fantastic pair of nutcases. However, despite all the punishment all six guys took, it was Stokely Hathaway who stole the show. I can’t really articulate it properly, but there’s a specific style of bump that non-wrestlers can do where they look like they absolutely ate shit and Stoke’s bump through the tables on this show is one of the best I’ve ever seen. Simultaneously the most violent yet funniest thing I’ve ever seen.

Delighted Thekla won. It’s a huge credit to her that she’s somehow gotten even more over since losing the belt. I’d consider putting it back on her. There’s a big babyface run hiding in plain sight here, you dumb bitches.

Trios Match was delicious. Still blows my mind what a slam-dunk this New Level run has been. Almost makes me forgive what these pricks did to Big E late last year!

Highlight of the match was the crowd erupting every time Hangman and Swerve interacted. Shades of the Trios Match at All Out 2022, when the same thing happened every time Hangman and Omega squared off. Unbelievable considering how many times they’ve gone back to it that the magic is still there with Hangman and Swerve. I’ll have to double check, but they’ve never done Hangman vs. Swerve for the AEW Title, have they? I wouldn’t be against that being next year’s All In main event.

I know most Fantasy Booking is wank, and I know we can never feel the way we used to feel about Hangman, but I saw a suggestion for how to get Hangman back into the Title picture the other day that I thought was really clever.

Will Ospreay goes on a huge run trying to defend the Title against all former champions still employed by AEW, to prove he’s the best of all time. He wins PPV matches against Mox, MJF, Swerve, Joe, Darby and even Jericho. Then, when the only one left is Hangman, Ospreay and the fans beg him to drop the stipulation about never fighting for the belt, and give Will the match. It takes weeks of convincing, but Hangman eventually agrees, provided we all promise we won’t hold it against him. And then in the match itself Hangman turns heel, cheats to win, and steals the belt.

[Chris B]

3 minutes ago, Supremo said:

It takes weeks of convincing, but Hangman eventually agrees, provided we all promise we won’t hold it against him. And then in the match itself Hangman turns heel, cheats to win, and steals the belt.

Because his heel turn ended up being so disturbing, it's easy to forget how funny it was at times. While a bunch of people were convinced he wasn't being full heel yet, there was the brilliant angle where he faked an ankle injury. He then went out on the following show, making a big deal about how he always told the truth and wouldn't lie to the audience - then attacking Swerve and immediately desperately explaining that he had to lie because Swerve hadn't left him a choice. He was being an absolutely hilarious dickhead, acting like a face but being heel, before he got injured for real for a couple of months.

[RedTwoster]

10 minutes ago, Supremo said:

Will Ospreay goes on a huge run trying to defend the Title against all former champions still employed by AEW, to prove he’s the best of all time. He wins PPV matches against Mox, MJF, Swerve, Joe, Darby and even Jericho. Then, when the only one left is Hangman, Ospreay and the fans beg him to drop the stipulation about never fighting for the belt, and give Will the match. It takes weeks of convincing, but Hangman eventually agrees, provided we all promise we won’t hold it against him. And then in the match itself Hangman turns heel, cheats to win, and steals the belt.

I absolutely love this idea. Hangman was a tremendous heel, and they only scratched the surface for what he could achieve in that role. 

Also, Ospreay/Darby for the title on PPV, fuck me that's an appealing prospect.