AEW All Out 2025: Biggest Winners & Losers

AEW All Out 2025 has come and gone. The show saw new champions crowned, old friendships rekindled, and the revival of at least one wrestling dinosaur. As always, it's time to look back at the event and decide who the biggest winners and losers are. 

This will not be a recap of what happened. I already did that for 6+ hours on the results page. It will also not be a collection of the good and the bad, as the Loved and Hated column already covered that as well. Instead, this will be a look at who looked triumphant, and who...well...didn't.

Sometimes a winner can be a loser, like in the case of Cope and Christian Cage, and their dearth of future prospects. Sometimes a loser can be a winner, like the newly crowned AEW Women's World Champion, Kris Statlander. Sometimes, it really is as simple as a winner is a winner, like in the case of Kris Statlander. Enough bloviating, let's break down the winners and losers from AEW's big show in Toronto.

Kris Statlander is one of the few talents on whom AEW can hang its hat. A solid independent star, her tenure in AEW has seen her rise steadily through the ranks, first as an underdog challenger to the AEW TBS Championship, and now as the shocking winner of Saturday's AEW Women's World Title Match. 

There had been something in the air surrounding the match, what with Toni Storm all but giving a preemptive farewell address on the "Dynamite" before the PPV, but few expected Statlander to be the one to dethrone Storm. Much of the build around the match, and much of the actual match itself, was centered on Toni Storm and Jamie Hayter's rivalry. Most of the main narrative beats of the match were built around Hayter and Storm coming to blows, and yet it was Statlander who was able to trap Storm in a clutch pin to win the title clean as a sheet. It was a shocking victory in the moment, but in the long arc of Statlander's AEW career, it might've been one of the most well-timed elevations of a talent in the company's young history.

It has always been clear that AEW saw Statlander as a future world champion, and many expected her to squander that potential the way so many other "future world champions" have, and yet the company and Statlander have seemingly timed her victory perfectly. The win was a very refreshing change of pace for a division that had begun to rest on the shoulders of one woman.

It took way too long to get here, the match itself wasn't exactly a firecracker, and the finish left the winners with little place else to go other than backwards. Overall, the reunion of Christian Cage and Cope seems to be exploding on the launchpad.

The reunion had been inevitable since the two men started wrestling in the same promotion. They did their best to delay it with a blood feud, but now Cope and Christian are back together, they've slayed FTR, and it appears that it's back to dealing with Nick Wayne and Kip Sabian for Adam Copeland. Cage got thoroughly dropped on his oft-injured head, so I assume he'll be away for a while, while Copeland is stuck in the mire, yelling at a twenty-year-old in between gasping for breath. It just feels like Cope is in his own universe, ala Chris Jericho, for much of his AEW career. Even the show's opening skit, which saw Cope and Christian do bits with "Trailer Park Boys" star Bubbles, felt like something from a different, more WWE-like show.

Sure, Cope and Christian vs. FTR is kind of a dream match, in the way that any former WWE champions facing off is a dream match in today's wrestling landscape, but these dream matches don't seem to do more than inflate Cope's already massive ego. The fact that a promising talent like Nick Wayne is going to be stuck on the receiving end of whatever corny, hokey insults Cope comes up with just adds to the worry over the future direction of this great tag team.

Every year, it seems that AEW has some kind of plan for Daniel Garcia to be taken under the wing of a veteran and finally fulfill the potential that all the AEW fans and pundits see in the former TNT Champion. Then he inevitably gets cooled off for one reason or another, and the process is forced to repeat itself. Well, it's that time of the year, and I'm ready to be hurt again.

Garcia is a great fit in the Death Riders. It's given him an excuse to be a tough, mean son-of-a-b****, and his match with Katsuyori Shibata on Saturday had exactly the kind of petulant fire with which Garcia should've been wrestling all along. Garcia won the match through sneaky cheating and acted like he'd been wrestling like that all along. He wrestled like an uncoiled spring, finally unleashed on the AEW roster. It really is wild how the whole Death Riders thing fits Garcia like a glove.

Hopefully this will not give way to some other veteran telling Garcia how important it was to be AEW's little dancing man, but for right now, I'm enjoyng the lack of hip swinging, the new entrance, and the new attitude. I only hope that the return of PAC, as well as Wheeler Yuta's overall standing in the Death Riders, doesn't lead to Garcia being stuck on the bench with Claudio Castagnoli.

In hindsight, maybe putting Eddie Kingston's return match second on the main card of a 6-hour PPV wasn't the smartest decision.

Kingston returned from over a year away, recovering from a leg injury, and while I would love to tell you that "The Mad King" hasn't lost a step, Saturday's match made it look like he's lost several. Maybe Big Bill wasn't the best opponent. Maybe Kingston needed a better return story. No matter what it might've been, what it was was a kind of middling match. Two men plodding around, throwing punches at each other until Kingston hit a glancing backfist for a pin so surprising that commentary spent the celebration trying to figure out how to explain Kingston's pitiful blow could topple a redwood like Big Bill.

By the end of the night, I'd barely remembered it had happened, and I didn't even have any WrestlePalooza responsibilities. I have to believe most people who took in the marathon of wrestling on Saturday also didn't quite register Kingston's return the way that he and AEW may have hoped. After Kingston's return, PAC returned, Jack Perry returned, Luchasaurus was revived from the dead (despite wrestling like a month ago), and all of it seemed to wash away Kingston's return.