10 Best Wrestling Matches Of 2025

8. Ivar Vs. Yoshiki Inamura (WWE Speed, February 28)

Almost every single professional wrestling match is too long nowadays. This is one of the major factors behind AEW’s decline. It’s enough already. Talk fans into the matches.

The pro wrestler is a creature with thin skin and a fragile ego. They want you to love them and they think you’ll love them if they put on great matches, and they must be long, because that is apparently the same thing. The self-conscious pro wrestling match is a plague that consumes everything. Even the not particularly long matches feel too long. The amount of matches that go 15 minutes that would be significantly better at 10 (or under!) is incalculable.

This era of the self-conscious “love me” match almost feels as behind the times as the wacky characters of 1995 WWF.

Thank Christ, then, for Ivar and Yoshiki Inamura, who took less than three minutes to elicit a sense of pure, roaring frenzy. This was the antidote to both the long match problem and the constant melodrama that drives almost every other character. Are they a good guy, or a bad guy?

Why can’t they just be a combat athlete with an undying will to win?

The story of the match was simple: two brute cavemen attempted to give each other CTE so rapidly that they gassed themselves out in under two minutes. A concentrated dose of sickening impact so godly that it turned you into a wild animal - on, of all shows, WWE Speed - this was destined for cult classic status the first time Ivar struck Inamura so hard that you couldn’t be sure you weren’t watching a shoot fight.

The all-or-nothing energy of this death sprint was absolutely awesome. The surreal backdrop allowed it to stand out - this went ridiculously hard for a WWE match in 2025 - but it would have been euphoric wrestling violence in any ring.