Match Spotlight: Shinsuke Nakamura Vs. AJ Styles, NJPW Wrestle Kingdom 10

As the career of "The Phenomenal" AJ Styles looks to be winding down, at least in WWE, everyone is feeling a little bit retrospective about Styles' career. People are going back and looking at some of his finest moments, his biggest championship victories, and the many, many classic matches he had all over the world over the past 27 years.

For a lot of fans, a large majority of those classic bouts came in his two year run with New Japan Pro Wrestling. Despite spending nearly 12 years with TNA and a full decade with WWE, Styles produced a catalogue of matches in two years with NJPW that most wrestlers wouldn't be about to match if they were given two decades. His IWGP Heavyweight Championship matches with Kota Ibushi and Kazuchika Okada, his G1 Climax matches with Hiroshi Tanahashi and Minoru Suzuki, and of course, his final singles match in NJPW against Shinsuke Nakamura at Wrestle Kingdom 10.

By the beginning of 2016, Styles had already established himself as perhaps the best wrestler in the world, reaching a plain of existence that seemed alien to a lot of people given how good his work in TNA and ROH was before it. Opposite him though was the definitive final form of "The King of Strong Style." Nakamura has also spent 10 years with WWE at this point, but when you go back to watch the mid-2010s and you see Nakamura oozing with confidence, dominating the spotlight, and genuinely being unlike any other wrestler on the planet in the best possible way, it does make you wonder whatever happened to this version of him.

This match was the first of what would become a series of singles matches between the two, and while WWE tried to recreate the magic years later, nothing beats the original. Given that the last match recently took place at WWE Saturday Night's Main Event, let's roll back the years and shine a spotlight on the IWGP Intercontinental Championship match between AJ Styles and Shinsuke Nakamura from NJPW Wrestle Kingdom 10.

To put it simply, this match is as good as everyone says it is. We touched on it when we gave our picks for the best matches of AJ Styles' career, but its on this particular rewatch where it becomes clear how special this match truly is. There is something magical about this time period for New Japan Pro Wrestling. There's an electricity in the air, you can understand why NJPW was as critically acclaimed as it was during this time because after watching the entrances you'll sit there like "I'm going to have this NJPWWorld subscription for a long time."

Going into Wrestle Kingdom 10, AJ Styles and Shinsuke Nakamura had been purposely kept apart. Every time it looked like they were going to cross paths, life would take them in a different direction, but when they did eventually go face-to-face in the World Tag League tournament in November 2015, everyone knew that Styles vs. Nakamura was the match to make, and it was made official for the Tokyo Dome very soon after.

With the benefit of hindsight, this is a match that wraps up Styles' big NJPW singles match run up in a neat bow. For two years as the leader of Bullet Club (you were the leader AJ, stop saying you weren't), Styles would happily use every underhanded tactic he could to help him over the line. He was more than talented enough to put anyone away himself, but interference and distractions from his Bullet Club brothers, low blows and everything in between were utilized to help keep "The Phenomenal One" on top of the pile in NJPW. Styles even goes to the well of faking a back injury and causing a brief stoppage, only to hop up and dive on Nakamura to take control of the match.

However, that would ultimately be Styles' downfall. Faking a back injury worked in the short-term, but in the long-term Nakamura would target the back repeatedly, knowing that without any strength in his back, a Styles Clash would be difficult accomplish. Nakamura even broke up Styles' control segment with a Backbreaker, little details like that made this match work so well. Styles did hit a weakened Styles Clash as a way of countering a Triangle Choke, but when he had the chance to finally deliver the definitive blow, Styles wanted to hit an Avalanche Styles Clash from the top, only for his arrogance to get in the way and be hit with an Avalanche Michinoku Driver and two Bomayes which gave Nakamura the win.

A Tokyo Dome classic where both men were aiming for the head at all times. It was AJ Styles at his best. It was Shinsuke Nakamura at his best. It was the Tokyo Dome crowd at their best, everything just works. If you enjoyed any of their WWE work together, watch this and understand what a perfect match between Styles and Nakamura is supposed to look like.

If there is one criticism that you could throw at the Wrestle Kingdom 10 match, it's that it set an ungodly standard for the two men for when they would cross paths later down the line. In the best possible way, this match being as good as it was gave the eventual rematches no chance of succeeding, especially in the environment they would take place in.

Two years after this bout, Styles and Nakamura would meet in another one-on-one contest, this time for the WWE Championship at WrestleMania 34. It marked one of the only times that a match has taken place at both WWE and NJPW's biggest shows, but only one of those companies knew how to present this bout. In WWE, the match was built as the dream match that everyone had been waiting for ever since the company signed both men shortly after Wrestle Kingdom 10, but in the end, the WrestleMania match just kind of fell flat.

In a vacuum, Styles vs. Nakamura at WrestleMania 34 is good. It's a little formulaic and toned down to cater to a casual WWE audience, but it's still good. However, everyone knew how good it could be as Wrestle Kingdom 10 was in the back of everyone's minds, meaning that the expectations for WrestleMania 34 were almost impossible for both men to reach. It's why the most memorable part of the eventual feud they had coming out of WrestleMania was best remembered for Styles and Nakamura kicking each other in the nuts over and over, WWE could never match what happened in the Tokyo Dome and decided to make it different. But as the old saying goes, if it ain't broke then don't fix it, so it's ironic that WWE made their 2018 feud about nut shots because WWE were kicking themselves in the nuts every time they presented another lesser version of what Styles and Nakamura did at Wrestle Kingdom 10.

The 2026 match at Saturday Night's Main Event is a much better affair and much more in line with Wrestle Kingdom 10, which is hilarious considering how far removed we are from that match now. Some of the praise of that match could be lobbied at Nakamura for simply being able wrestle a good match after all this time, but it's still a very fun experience that acts as a nice coda to the series of matches both men have had over the years. However, as we said at the start, sometimes you just can't beat the original, and if you find a spare 30 minutes or so before the Royal Rumble this Saturday, go and watch this match and appreciate that we got to live in the same time period as AJ Styles.