5 WWE Wrestlers Who Should Jump To AEW (And 5 Who Shouldn't)
2. SHOULD - Rey Mysterio
If Rey Mysterio appears ageless, it's because his work is timeless.
Even when it felt positively futuristic, in 1996, Rey grasped the core element by selling like a master. You couldn't see his face through the mask, but he was exceptional at crumpling his body into positions of agony and further informing the plight he faced with such visual heft. Between his ability to excite and elicit sympathy from the audience, Rey is almost the ideal babyface.
That ideal babyface is doing virtually f*ck all on SmackDown, between eating short clean losses to Baron Corbin and going 50/50 in a two-match series with Otis and Chad Gable that in totality failed to break the five minute mark.
His son's progress is his primary concern in 2021, and in what should be a sobering development, AEW has, through the amazing improvement shown by Dr. Britt Baker and Tay Conti, and without a dedicated multi-million dollar Performance Center, proven itself a better developmental league than NXT. And yes, reps are reps, but WWE's systemic inattentive approach means that they can't be relied upon to refine Dominick's natural gifts.
The AEW management team reveres Rey - he could go out with an amazing library of work in the last chapter - and he would be perfect in the player/coach role. There are several young players that would benefit from studying his approach to the psychological craft.