50 Best Wrestlers Of The 2020s (So Far)

17. The Young Bucks

WWE Night Of Champions 2025 Cody Rhodes King Of The Ring
AEW

Influential, controversial and undeniable, The Young Bucks' half-decade has been their most eventful yet. On the strength of what they got up to in the 2010s, this took some doing.

Having long cemented their place as two of the best wrestlers of all time, the formation of AEW simultaneously normalised much of their magic while proving that so few others can manage it quite as well. Matt(hew) and Nick(-cholas) Jackson are still incomparable in terms of high-flying, innovative double-team manoeuvres and chemistry. The bar they've set is so high that often when they're not in transcendent form, they're considered lazy or past their best. An impossible standard set, then, but something surpassing it is never far away

In any given year, a Young Bucks match could be the company's very best, and for 2020 in particular, may well be the best of all time. Shortly before the pandemic ripped audiences away from the promotion in peak form, The Bucks, Hangman Page and Kenny Omega delivered their opus at Revolution - a match that, in league with Being The Elite, years of stories past and years of stories still to come in future was so fantastic that it laid down a marker to every wrestler to follow it for the rest of the decade. For better and sometimes worse, most are still trying.

Do they really truly want to Change The World as much as they used to? Probably not, but surely this yet again reveals the aforementioned impossible standard - there's a vast, vast majority that never manage such a lofty feat once, let alone once a year. 

Contributor
Contributor

Michael is a writer, editor, podcaster and presenter for WhatCulture Wrestling, and has been with the organisation over 8 years. He primarily produces written, audio and video content on WWE and AEW, but also provides knowledge and insights on all aspects of the wrestling industry thanks to a passion for it dating back over 35 years. As one third of "The Dadley Boyz" Michael has contributed to the huge rise in popularity of the WhatCulture Wrestling Podcast and its accompanying YouTube channel, earning it top spot in the UK's wrestling podcast charts with well over 62,000,000 total downloads. Within the podcasting space, he also co-hosts Benno & Hamflett, In Your House! and Podcast Horseman: The BoJack Horseman Podcast. He has been featured as a wrestling analyst for the Tampa Bay Times, Fightful, POST Wrestling, GRAPPL, GCP, Poisonrana and Sports Guys Talking Wrestling, and has covered milestone events in New York, Dallas, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, London and Cardiff. Michael's background in media stretches beyond wrestling coverage, with a degree in Journalism from the University Of Sunderland (2:1) and a series of published articles in sports, music and culture magazines The Crack, A Love Supreme and Pilot. When not offering his voice up for daily wrestling podcasts, he can be found losing it singing far too loud watching his favourite bands play live. Follow him on X/Twitter - @MichaelHamflett