10 Future AEW World Champions
7. Darby Allin
For Jungle Boy and Sammy Guevara, repeat for Darby Allin. AEW has done an excellent job of establishing a crop of younger stars who will carry the promotion into its next phase, when the current core makes it to the end of their storied careers. This is one of the most blindingly obvious ways in which AEW has learnt from the mistakes of WWE and WCW before it. The failure to establish a new generation of stars did for WCW and is doing the same for WWE.
Darby Allin was one of the superstars of AEW's first steps, a curious personality with crossover appeal that seems to have overachieved, or at least seemed to before the empty arena era. History has shown that if kids turn up to shows dressed as you, you're doing something very, very right.
In many ways, Darby Allin in 2020 finds himself in a similar position to early '00s Jeff Hardy. Popular with kids and adults alike, an eccentric charisma that many strive to recreate but few have the intangible skill to pull off, Darby and Jeff are cut from similar cloth. The fact that neither man has ever shown much concern for their own physical well-being is another similarity.
Darby Allin has told many listeners that he plans on leaving professional wrestling sooner rather than later, so it may well be a race against time for him to scratch his way to the top of the mountain.