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The 45th annual Wrestling Observer Awards are in the books and once again we take a look at what are the most prestigious awards that exist in our space. While the Observer Awards don’t give out physical hardware – with the only way you could fill space in a trophy cabinet being maybe framing a printed copy of the write-up of the award you win, (that’s something you can imagine Eddie Gilbert doing back in the day) – looking at the Observer Awards is a very good guide to what was good and what wasn’t in the calendar year just gone.
So, let’s look at what won, what didn’t and what the Wrestling Observer Awards tells us about the wrestling scene right now.
Below is the link of the 2024 Observer Awards in full
1- A win for Box Office
In my review of the Voices of Wrestling MOTY poll, where I predicted correctly that Will Ospreay would win Most Outstanding based on the fact that he had the most matches in the Top 100, I said it was going to be a case of Box Office merits versus Most Outstanding In-Ring merits in the Flair/Thesz Award (or Wrestler of the Year for us goobers) and the top two did end up being Ospreay and the man with the best Box Office stats of 2024, Cody Rhodes. So, the winner was……
Cody Rhodes.
As seen above, the split in the last decade has been even. But it can be argued that no man has had the numbers at the box office that Cody has had in the past decade. It can also be argued that Cody is just a cog in the WWE machine.
Usually the winner of WOTY has held a world title in a Big-2 / Big-3 company for at least 30% or more of the year – Will’s win of WOTY last year made him the third in this century (Angle-2002 and Nakamura-2014 being the others) to win Flair/Thesz while being World Champ for less than that percentage duration. Based on this, the realistic shots to win were Cody, Damian Priest, Gunther, Swerve Strickland, Samoa Joe, Jon Moxley and Tetsuya Naito. Only Swerve (and Naito, if you could ignore his fall off in-ring and just focus on the fact that his box-office numbers kept NJPW somewhat ok-ish at the gate in 2024) could compete with Cody as viable contenders for the blue-ribbon of the Observer Awards.
I should note that five of the ten Worst Major Shows in this year's awards were headlined by the Wrestler of the Year…
2- WWE is hot (apparently)
If you are a regular listener to the Wrestling Observer Radio show, you might be familiar with the following phrases from Big Dave:
“Let me find my notes”
“It’s just what they do”
“Tony’s going to do what Tony’s going to do”
“This is what happens in every wrestling war"
In the last few years however you can add “WWE is hot right now” to that list as that has been a regular quote from Dave no matter what.
CM Punk and Drew McIntyre are fighting over a bracelet? “WWE is hot right now.”
WWE are doing a storyline based on Vince McMahon showing people photos of the woman he’s abusing? “WWE is hot right now.”
Triple H probably still hasn’t read the lawsuit? “WWE is hot right now.”
You get the drift.
Thing is, based on this year's awards, the WOR listenership kind of agrees.
With nine wins among the positive awards, it marks the most kudos WWE have won since 2011 (and it was 10 that year.) Cody’s WOTY is the first by a WWE wrestler since 2016 (AJ Styles), Drew McIntyre’s Best on Interviews win is WWE’s first since 2018 (Daniel Bryan), Punk vs McIntyre’s Best Feud is the first WWE main roster win in that category since 2011 (Cena/Punk), and Triple H and Nick Khan won Best Booker and Promoter respectively once again (I’m not doing the Nick Khan isn’t a promoter rant again) and WWE won Best Promotion for the second year running, the first time they’ve repeated that particular award since 1999/2000.
But it’s the “negative awards” that show how weird the wins of WWE are in context. Wins in Worst Major Show and Worst Match, 5 entries in the Worst Feud Top 10 list, (tbf AEW supplemented the other 5) plus the traditional win in Most Disgusting Promotional Tactic showed that WWE might be hot, but the actual in-ring product might be as fun to watch as putting your hand on a burning stove to many.
The Worst Match list also tells of the alternate personalities of WWE’s year.
Punk vs McIntyre might have won Feud of the Year but their Summerslam contest was 4th on the Worst Match list and Cody vs Solo Sikoa finished 10th meaning that it was first time a FOTY winner had got a match from said feud into the Worst match list (if you don’t want to be pedantic about Hogan vs Savage at Halloween Havoc being 2nd in 1996 when the WCW vs NWO won FOTY that year) and Cody was the first WOTY to feature in Worst Match since Big Van Vader in 1993 (and that was a War Games match that featured Sid, The Shockmaster and Harlem Heat before they figured out pro wrestling.)
For a company that's so hot, the tan looks like something that would make Adam Cole balk.
3- A reflection on the low quality of the year
Usually someone wins more than two awards in an edition of the Observer Awards. The only times that someone had not achieved top spot in three or more awards in a year were 1987, 2009, 2010, 2014 and 2016. But 2024 was close to achieving that fate.
Will Ospreay would win four awards this time round in Most Outstanding, Match of the Year, Best Flying Wrestler (his fifth) and Best Maneuver. Most Outstanding is a given from now until someone gets as good as Billy Babyface. The Danielson Dynasty match made it a Ospreay 3-Peat in MOTY with only Kenta Kobashi (03-05) Shawn Michaels (08-10) and Kazuchika Okada (16-18) also having that accomplishment to their name and Ospreay’s Hidden Blade became the second move to 3-Peat in Maneuver alongside the One Winged Angel from Will’s new best friend Kenny Omega (no wonder Konosuke Takeshita didn’t kick out of that double impact move at GS Australia.)
With WON awards with Ospreay’s name engraved on it for the time being, no one else joined him on four wins this year and no-one got close.
Cody Rhodes won WOTY and USA MVP which go with the other in voting patterns for understandable reasons. Zack Sabre Jr. won Best Technical Wrestler and Japan MVP which he was favoured for and Drew McIntyre won Feud and Best on Interviews which makes a modicum of sense as Drew’s abilities on the mic drove the feud while friendship bracelets were flying more than a friends get-together outside Wembley Stadium but the lack of someone to challenge Will in the race to win the most awards this year shows that it was not a vintage year by any means.
Yes, Danielson vs Ospreay was an all-timer and deserving of MOTY but were the other winners outside Will’s wins vintage years.
Cody’s year outside the night of the title win wasn’t really one that would put him on the S Tier of Flair/Thesz years like Flair’s 89, Austin’s 98 or Okada’s 17, it wouldn’t even make the next tier below. As much as I love the Bucks, 2024 would be in the lower half of the 8 years of their Tag Team of the Year wins if I was to make a list. Has Drew ever been seen as a promo guy before 2024? I’ll save my reservations about Feud of the Year until later.
All in all, 2024 just didn’t hit those vibes that makes us love wrestling so much. Maybe NJPW’s down year as seen with Sabre Jr.’s two wins being their only wins, their worst showing in the Observer Awards since 2011 being the prime example of that played into it and also AEW despite their numerous wins not getting the feeling back, it just felt that 2024 was mid.
4- Just call it The Young Bucks Award already
Oops, they did it again.
For the eighth year, Matt and Nick Jackson (Matt and Nick Massie) won the Best Tag Team. So, let’s look at the standings for most points accumulated by tag teams in this award.
Some people thought Fraxiom should have won but the Bucks, while not having the depth of matches TAFKA Ben Carter and A-Kid had, had the quality that Fraxiom wished for. From the Revolution main event to the Ospreay/Fletcher match to the Private Party title switch, the Bucks had the best CV of any duo in 2024.
Bryan Danielson won nine Best Technical Wrestler Awards before it was named after the American Dragon. While the retirement of Danielson did play into the renaming of said award, such domination of both awards should play into the equal treatment of both awards.
SO let’s call it The Young Bucks Award. I’m sure the fringes of wrestling social media would take that development normally.
5- The award wins that condemn AEW
While AEW was the promotion that won the most “positive” awards, they did win their fair share of “Worst” awards. Worst Feud went to the saga of the brochachos that was Adam Cole and MJF making it the first time that the winners went back to back in that feud. Rampage won Worst TV Show which is weird in my opinion considering the show in 2025 was aggressively fine (my theory on this I’ll explain later.)
But it’s one award and its winner that tells you a problem of AEW's own making at the moment.
Most Underrated has been a longstanding award in the WON Awards. Presented since 1980, the inception of the Observer Awards, Most Underrated’s criteria actually isn’t what is said on the tin. The description of the award is that the person who has been the most Underpushed should be voted for.
Why not call it Most Underpushed then?
The history of the awards has seen a WWE wrestler win the award 23 years in a row from 1999 to 2021. It’s a streak that shows the problems that WWE have inflicted on themselves in their inability to promote people from the mid-card to the top of the card and those they give the ball ending up being the wrong people.
So that makes the fact that AEW have “won” this award twice in the last three years a concern for All Elite Wrestling. The fact that 6 of the Top 11 are All Elite is also a problem, a problem that AEW have started to create for themselves.
Looking at the Top 10/11, the confusion between Underrated and Underpushed is still there for voters. You can’t say that Gabe Kidd was underpushed or the same for Harley Cameron. But when it comes to the winner, who was the winner in 2022 as well, Konosuke Takeshita’s underrated-ness in 2024 is a damnation of lack of ability of AEW and Tony Khan in particular to promote people from the midcard to the top of the card (Swerve excepted).
The biggest damnation in this is that Takeshita finished 3rd in Most Outstanding. A man who is one of the best in the world in-ring is underpushed? Yeah, that’s an AEW problem.
It’ll be a bigger problem for AEW in the next year with Konosuke having the NEVER Openweight Title in NJPW and putting on bangers and looking more likely to win the IWGP World Heavyweight belt than the AEW World belt at this point and with Takeshita having three contracts right now with two of them being New Japan and All Elite, Konosuke has a date in the future to make a choice which contract(s) he has to extend and as of right now, the probable choice is going to make AEW’s inability to promote wrestlers to new levels look really bad.
6- That was the Feud of the Year Top 10?
Yeah, I know
The feud that was about friendship bracelets won the same award that the Von Erichs vs Freebirds, Tanahashi vs Okada and Misawa vs Tsuruta had won. When you see that the Summerslam dud made the Worst Match Top 10 it’s a very bemusing call in my opinion and of course it beat Hangman vs Swerve (my pick). Maybe the Hell In A Cell match tipped the weight to the Battle For The Bracelet.
Do I need to tap the sign?
Cody vs The Bloodline wasn’t a surprise to be near the top considering that it was the feud that headlined the most successful event in WWE monetary-wise and one of the reasons WWE is “hot”. Toni Storm vs Mariah May might have divided opinions but in my worldview those who don’t like the Storm/May feud are wronger than a Ben Miller tweet. MJF/Ospreay being 7th – despite a run-up to All In that saw MJF have no grasp on the pulse of good storytelling and showed how likeable Will Ospreay actually is right now because the pro-American rhetoric, no matter how insincere it was from Max could have made the crowd turn on any other non-American – was certainly a choice in my eyes that it made the list, and Liv/Rhea being in the nine voted on is also something, and the fact that there seems to be only nine feuds voted for with no honourable mentions tells you the dearth of good stories told in 2024 reiterating a point I made at No.3.
7- Hangman’s tale
Despite people who put out audio content on the F4W website being bemused by his inclusion in the Top 10 (I’m looking at you Garrett) Hangman Page was the best Promo of 2024. That promo during The Owen, the work did in promos during the Jay White feud and also his work on the mic to establish his heel turn in Q1 of last year – there was no-one better at talking in 2024 in wrestling.
Hangman (with Swerve) was one half of my Feud of the Year but as mentioned before he was bettered by The Battle For The Bracelet but there were wins for Page.
His Buckshot Lariat was the most voted move in Best Wrestling Maneuver that wasn’t a Will Ospreay move which in itself is a victory and Hangman became the first person since 2013 that isn’t Tomohiro Ishii or Jon Moxley to win Best Brawler.
2024 saw an evolution in the Hangman which made him the best storyteller in wrestling and while others might have ranked higher in awards in this year's edition, it felt like Adam Page has a higher upside than those who did position in first in Best on Interviews and Feud of the Year just by adding a new dimension to his game as evident by his Best Brawler win.
But it was someone else that placed in many categories that was the real pleasant surprise of this particular awards.
8- At least Sareee won Women’s MVP (and did so much more)
Readers of my look at the 2024 Voices of Wrestling Match of the Year will probably remember my existential crisis about the possibility of Rhea Ripley winning Women’s MVP over Sareee.
Now it’s nothing against Rhea (actually it is. I really don’t understand people’s love for Rhea) but Sareee has been the story of not just Women’s Wrestling in 2024 but wrestling in general. In a world where we are told that you need to be tied to a company to be successful in pro wrestling, Sareee is a being that was more common in the 80’s before Vince McMahon invaded the territories – a freelancer. Sareee had “notebook” matches in four different promotions including one that she has set up herself.
Sareee-ism has been way better than MJF-ism and Mox-ism for sure. It’s been a rip-roaring success to the point that Sareee placed 5th in Best Promoter and 6th in Best Booker and her talents have seen her finish 3rd in Japan MVP, 5th in Most Outstanding and 8th in WOTY. A vote for Sareee has been a vote for independence. It’s also a vote for life outside the Big 3. It is also a vote for showing that NXT really didn’t know what they had with TAFKA Sarray.
Whoever thought Sarray was best presented as a magical school girl probably thought Kazuchika Okada was best suited to be The Green Hornet’s sidekick.
Sareee winning Women’s MVP did restore a semblance of faith in the voting base but that it was so close between her and Rhea tells its own story on the Observer Awards.
9- Has the Observer subscriber base/awards voting base changed? (for the worse)
The voting base for the Wrestling Observer Awards is very simple to explain. You subscribe to the F4Wonline site, you get a vote. The method of voting is another story.
Until this awards season, the way of voting was to send an email to Dave with proof of your purchase (like a receipt for example) This year however, Fred Morlan, a co-host of The Good, The Bad and The Hungee, a podcast on the VOW network composed a Google Form and according to Fred on the VOW public Discord.....
“I have a fucking doctorate and getting Dave to finally do a Google Form was approximately as gruelling”
Some people would say that the upsurge in votes for WWE come from the fact that WWE fans are incapable of constructing a lengthy email and find the concept of a form easier to negotiate. Of course, I wouldn’t say that. That’s just terribly mean.
But the split in the voting amongst the base is there to see. As mentioned earlier, the winners of Best Promotion didn’t produce the Best TV Show. Booker of the Year Paul Levesque booked 6 of the Top 10 Worst Major Wrestling Shows. For historical context until 2020, when AEW under that year’s Best Booker Tony Khan, All Out placed in the Top 10 of Worst Major Show and in 2022 that year’s All Out also placed in the same category (I blame Punk for that one) the last time a winner of Best Booker also “booked” a listed Worst Major Show was 1999 and the combo of Vince McMahon and four shows yet in 2023 Levesque’s WWE placed 5 shows in Worst Show.
CM Punk finishing in the Top 10 in the Most Outstanding list is a vote so bad that even Ibou formerly from WrestlePurists would go “what?” And – while AEW showing the Punk/Perry "Thrillla in Gorilla" footage moment went down like a wet fart in a lift – for that to be voted 3rd for Most Disgusting ahead of "WWE whitewashing Vince McMahon from history rather than addressing the culture in the company" and getting three times the votes says a lot.
But some particular winners not only made me scratch my head but made me wonder about how much of the “follow the leader” mentality there is in the voting patterns of voters.
Rampage won Worst TV Show. It wasn’t the Worst Wrestling TV Show of the year. Rampage was aggressively ok. It became the sickos show. If you wanted weird dream matches that weren’t going to do anything at the box office, Fridays at 10pm EST/3am UK time was the place to go. Yes, if your weekend was so busy that you couldn’t fit an hour of Rampage in, you wouldn’t get FOMO. But again Rampage was aggressively ok. There were years when Rampage was worse. Remember the Trustbusters era of Rampage in 2022?
So why did Rampage win/lose? I think because Bryan and Vinny stopped reviewing the show in late 2024 – that told listeners subliminally that Rampage was the worst show in wrestling.
But maybe the most obvious case of the fanbase changing is the Best Book and Best Documentary Awards.
Becky Lynch’s The Man is a decent book. Becky is a charming writer who took the idea from Mick Foley to not use a ghost writer and she channels Foley in her prose. But the fed-head in her is obvious to see from the North Pole. As much as the book was easy to listen to on Audible, I did so many headturns at moments like Becky comparing NXT to ECW that I might need a chiropractor after listening to The Man. The runner-up, The Six Pack: On The Open Road In Search of Wrestlemania is a much better book and probably would have won 10 years ago in a face off between a WWE autobiography and an independent book about wrestling, but it’s now 2025...
But the Best Documentary winner is the biggest sign of the change in subscriber base.
Mr. McMahon sucked. It really did. From Episode 1 which was deathly dull, to Episode 3 which spent more time on The Kliq’s farewell than any time spent on the ring boy scandal or the murder of Nancy Argentino in earlier episodes, an Episode 4 that felt like every Attitude Era documentary you’ve seen from WWE, and an Episode 5 that was straight from those 24/7 docs on the WWE Network sealed the fate of a documentary from Netflix that made the "Connor Stalions – SIgn Stealer" documentary look like a Ken Burns documentary. It just wasn’t good at all.
Maybe it’s Dark Side of the Ring fatigue and yes, the latest season was the poorest that VICE have produced, but still, every episode from season four of DSOTR was better than Mr. McMahon. Even more bemusing is the inclusion of Queen of Villains in the Top Ten. IT’S A FICTION SHOW!. Even my 80 year-old dad, who is deaf who I watched it with, knew it wasn't a documentary. When he asked me with the intention of being assured whether or not the moment when Dump and Chigusa attacked the promoters, “did that actually happen?” the answer was obvious. Calling Queen of Villains a documentary is like calling The Crown a docu-series.
Maybe that alone is a tell-tale sign that the Observer subscriber base has changed and not for the better.
10. Saying farewell to the Observer
Now that I've finished this article, I'm going to press the unsubscribe button on my F4WOnline/Observer subscription.
I don't want this to be a “look at me, I'm unsubscribing” piece. I remember reading an article on Voices of Wrestling in the build up to All In 2023 which had someone writing a long piece on why they were going to stop watching AEW after the Wembley show and thinking “what a dork” and no-one actually wants to be a dork.
But………
Having been a subscriber for many years, the Observer has been part of my life as much as Netflix and AEW Plus. Longer actually. From listening to the radio shows to reading the Observer on a Thursday night while waiting for the pub quiz to start at the Flapper and then Friday afternoons on my commute back home from work, listening to old Bryan and Vinny’s to make lockdown go quicker, Dave and Bryan and Vinny and Mike are voices that have resonated with me and lived in my head for years which makes the decision to unsubscribe hard. But with a price increase to something that is now my costliest expense in my subscription portfolio, I would want a product to reflect that prestige.
It hasn't happened.
WOR is now a recap service with less coverage of companies that once made the Observer the world leader in world journalism. Bryan tried to defend the lack of coverage of NJPW on the board this past week.
Reading that tells you that this isn't my Observer any more and it feels on reading the awards that I'm not the only one that thinks that. It might be a harsh reality of 21st-century business but for my north of 10 quid expense where I go to to learn about wrestling, it's increasingly going to the easier common denominator when it comes to content. if I wanted reviews of RAW and NXT, I'd go to the Post and Fightful YouTube pages.
Others have lapped Dave on coverage of the Janel Grant trial, their radio shows have the energy of a couple who are only staying together for the kids but the kids have already left home for college and the Observer lacks the wit and charm it did decades ago. Dave and Bryan have simply driven away the people who read the Observer to learn, not to have things they’ve already seen recapped for them.
And if you don't want to just take this Brummie's opinion, let's look at the Bluesky post that Wrestling Playlists (@pwoloss) put out about the Wrestling Observer today.
