AEW: Who Are the Top Five Debuts In All Elite Wrestling History?
AEW, which debuted on May 25, 2019, with its inaugural Double or Nothing card, has been around for just over three years now. Those three years have been jam-packed with an abundance of tremendous professional wrestling and many surprising and monumental debuts.
A great debut can be judged on many different factors. But two things that always make a debut more sensational are the popularity/notoriety of the wrestler debuting as well as the surprise factor of the debut.
While the surprise factor of a star debuting with a new promotion seems hard to come by these days, promotions picking and choosing when and how to debut a star is something that can still very much surprise fans. And AEW has had many opportunities to practice this as they have been very busy adding talent to the roster.
Some debuts are cool for the night or a couple of weeks and then the hype wears off. Some debuts are the kind that people still talk about months and sometimes years later. With that being said, let’s take a look at the top five debuts in the short history of All Elite Wrestling.
What are the top five debuts in the history of AEW?
#5: Malakai Black
The debut of Malakai Black was perfect in so many ways, which gives his debut the nod over Claudio Castagnoli, Samoa Joe, Keith Lee, Jeff Hardy, Ruby Soho, and others.
One of the things that made Black’s debut so compelling was that no one expected it. Most wrestling fans figured that Black had the standard 90-day non-compete that the other WWE main roster talent had once released. But an error on WWE’s part allowed Black to only have to serve a 30-day non-compete, which led to the timing of his AEW debut being a complete shock to most.
Black showing up in AEW and going after Arn Anderson and Cody Rhodes immediately established him as one of the top heels in AEW, as Cody, at the time, was one of the top babyfaces. It was an impactful debut that had people buzzing about his arrival.
Black’s feud with Cody was also the beginning of the AEW crowd turning on Cody Rhodes and may have ended up playing a part in the way that the relationship between Rhodes and AEW ended.