50 Best Wrestlers Of The 2020s (So Far)
8. Bryan Danielson
It comes to something that three of Bryan Danielson's best ever WWE matches took place in the 2020s and he was only there for 18 months, and something else entirely that two of them - Vs AJ Styles in the Performance Center and Vs Roman Reigns in the ThunderDome - happened without people there to witness them.
The last - a blinding triple threat against Reigns and Edge at WrestleMania 37 - was a match Bryan himself said left him with conflicting feelings, and within a few months of that 'Show Of Shows' classic, he was lighting up Arthur Ashe Stadium with one of the best matches in Dynamite history against Kenny Omega.
Mr Consistent(ly awesome) has been just that, with the 2020s serving mostly as a reminder of what it is to have somebody of his talents back full time (or an approximation of it) making up for the years he lost to injury and/or bad booking in the years prior. At this point a living influence, his ability to shape-shift between being the guy working his personal bucket list dream matches to being other wrestlers' personal bucket list dream match has been a joy to behold as he's stacked up the contemporary classics wrestling as if the clock's been on pause since the mid-2000s.
As if to put a finer point on just how valued he is in his current surrounds, Tony Khan said that if anything happened to him he'd trust Danielson wholly with the keys to AEW. There'd be little backlash, at very least - Bryan's perhaps even more beloved by AEW's core base than the WWE one that powered him to title glory all those years ago.