AEW WrestleDream 2026: Biggest Winners & Losers

The world has finally awoken from its WrestleDream, and it’s time to anoint some winners and losers. The show was a smorgasbord of wrestling action, with multiple title matches, and the successful AEW debut of Clockwork Carnage. You can read all about what happened on the AEW WrestleDream 2026 Live Results page, and the staff went through what they loved and what they didn’t in the AEW WrestleDream Hated & Loveds column.

So let’s talk winners, let’s talk losers. The great thing about AEW running marathon shows is that there’s plenty of each. As always winners will not be literal, hell they might not even be people at all, and the same goes for the losers. Winners can lose, losers can win, and match stipulations get their flowers.

Enough of my bloviating, though. It’s time to get in to the Biggest Winners and the Biggest Losers, with a very obvious winner to kick things off.

I was a little skeptical of the Clockwork Carnage Match. It sounded like it would be a mess of nearfalls and eliminations to make up for the fact that all the real drama is in the last 5 minutes or so, but I am happy to be proven wrong.

AEW only has so many stipulation matches that they can claim. A lot of their stipulations are modified versions of WWE, TNA, or WCW matches. AEW didn’t invent Clockwork Carnage, that bit of trivia belongs to Pro Wrestling EVE, but by being the first to bring it to a global stage, it is now theirs. It’s not reinventing the wheel, it’s like a gauntlet eliminator match that turns into a multi-man Iron Man Match at the end, but it does feel perfect for the skillset of the AEW roster. 

Let’s be honest, AEW is something of a promotion made entirely out of TNA’s X-Division, and Clockwork Carnage is exactly the kind of highly-entertaining, highly-athletic nonsense that the X-Division guys were doing in the mid-2000s. It’s just a perfect marriage of match and promotion.

The lineup was also stellar. Adding the soon-to-be-retired Adam Copeland into the match made the match more sentimental than I expected. I am no Edge-Head, but watching him mix it up with some of the future AEW World Champions, and the various shows of respect throughout helped make the middle portion far more substantive than the stipulation suggested.

A home run for AEW, and a grand slam for Pro Wrestling EVE, who will be able to tout “the original” for as long as they run.

I think Persephone is a tremendous in-ring talent. I also think that the AEW TBS Title Four-Way Match was a very solid match. It just lacked drama, and that feels like a crushingly regular thing with Persephone.

It’s hard to describe, but between the underwhelming nature of her competition, as well as the Britt Baker of it all, it feels like Persephone is in a placeholder situation. Like Thekla’s world title reign, she is mainly champion so that AEW can get the proper pieces in place for whatever plans they have for the next champion. But unlike Thekla, she is not interrupting the show with chaotic promos and working with the word “b****” like Dutch Masters worked in oil and pigment.

It feels like she is having great matches, while spinning her wheels narratively. The nature of her opponents doesn’t provide the drama that could warrant a title reign of “good matches” and not much else. I am waiting for the other shoe to drop, and I am getting bored.

The great thing about Clockwork Carnage is that it broke open the edges of the AEW main event scene. Speedball Mike Bailey, specifically, felt like they were elevated by their presence in the match. There were plenty of men in the match who have never been AEW World Champion, but they were the Kazicuka Okadas, Konosuke Takeshitas, and Adam Copelands of the world. Mike Bailey had some proving-themself to do, and prove themself he did.

It’s something wrestlers, promoters, and pundits talk about all the time, but very hard to pull off. You surround a person like Mike Bailey with the best of the best, and you push them over the borderline into the main event scene. There is only so much that a Dynamite main event can do for someone’s perception. A PPV main event, even one with as many bells and whistles as Clockwork Carnage, is simply a different animal, and Bailey wrestled that animal into submission.

I don’t know if Mike Bailey will actually become World Champion, but a lot of wrestlers never become world champion. The important point is that in a year, two years, whenever the Adam Copelands and the Jon Moxleys have walked off into the sunset, someone like Mike Bailey is going to have to be in those main event matches, and Saturday proved that they’ll belong when the time comes.

I am running out of ways to say this: AEW f***** up this whole Kyle Fletcher/Kevin Knight thing. Thrust into a match they had no business in due to Steve Borden’s injury, the loss to The Young Bucks on Saturday just proves my point. Neither of these guys should be getting pinned in matches this high profile. They are two future main eventers, and AEW is holding them back with this tag team nonsense.

They will luckily be able to move on, but it doesn’t change the fact that the match did more for The Young Bucks than it did for Fletcher and Knight. As I said before, they were glorified tomato cans, who have both outgrown tag team wrestling.

Now, they must rebuild. Fletcher’s prospects aren’t terrible. He has enough history with Will Ospreay to heat up a world title feud, even if it just culminates in a special “Dynamite,” while Knight feels like he’s back at square one. His former tag partner Mike Bailey was wrestling for the world title, while he was once again failing to become tag team champion. The whole thing has definitely been an albatross around Knight’s neck, which is a shame. His tag team with Bailey was cut short because AEW clearly sees singles potential in both men, but Knight is back in the tag division, while Speedball progresses. It’s just sad.

Ilja Dragunov has been wrestling on eggshells for the last few years. In WWE, it was clear that his high-intensity, high-impact style was being neutered, so as not to bruise and batter the sensitive constitutions of the WWE locker room. 

And now he is no longer in the WWE locker room.

It does not matter where Dragunov ends up on the card, lower card, midcard, main event, wherever, he promises to bring a fight to whatever show he’s on. 

It’s possible I could eat my words. There are stories of theater-trained actors, who must rein in their outsized performances for film, and in doing so, the muscle atrophies, leaving them stuck. It’s possible that Ilja has been wrestling the WWE style for so long that his more violent instincts have atrophied, but I have a feeling that if he was having that easy of a time fitting into the WWE style, we wouldn’t be in this situation. There’s a bevy of dream matches at his disposal, and AEW is never shy about pushing a new signing (MCMG aside), so it feels like, at this moment, the sky is the limit for Dragunov.

Mark Davis went into AEW WrestleDream with the most momentum he’s had his entire career. I really thought he might pull it off, and graduate from National Champion to Continental Champion. Jon Moxley seemed like he might need a break. It felt like the timing was right.

But alas, Moxley choked out Davis in a blistering match. I don’t think Davis is dead in the water or anything, but it does feel like he hit a ceiling, and now he has to figure out some other way to break through it. He was chipping away at it, he even beat Moxley on TV, but he simply couldn’t crack through, and in these hours after the show, I wonder if he ever will.

Like I said, this is definitely not the end for Davis, and he now has a tremendous story for the Continental Classic, but it still feels like AEW missed the boat on this one. He could’ve been a made man with one win on Saturday, but he will have to wait to get his button. Here’s hoping AEW doesn’t wait too long.