10 Biggest Game-Changers In Wrestling Right Now

10. AJ Styles

Like any other main roster wrestler, AJ Styles operates within a framework that actively undermines creativity, freedom, and risk, defined by a list of restrictions and guidelines that reads like an airport novella. He doesn't produce transcendent in-ring epics with the regularity of a Kazuchika Okada not because he's incapable of doing so, but because it isn't in his job description anymore. This is Sports Entertainment, pal. We make movies.

Yet 'The Phenomenal One' is consistently the best wrestler in his company, and aside from early-year Seth Rollins, nobody has done more to push WWE's main roster in-ring standards forward in 2018.

The WWE Champion is the antithesis of his Universal counterpart. While Reigns is a solid, well-rounded performer miscast in a role he isn't suited to playing, Styles is in the perfect spot. He is a hard-working, crowd-pleasing figurehead whose near year-long reign feels like fan service in an era where fan service often seems extinct, and when he's done, this late-career run will be the cherry on top of his G.O.A.T. argument (a conversation Styles absolutely belongs in).

His importance as a figurehead in SmackDown's rebirth as WWE's most enjoyable main roster show can't be denied either, and few performers are as capable at overcoming inconsistent writing.