The inaugural AEW Redemption took place in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, last night. With just a month until All In, the show fit a weird slot in the AEW calendar, as it did more to set the table for August’s massive show, than it did to stand on its own. We’ve already gone over what happened on the AEW Redemption – 7/26/2026 Results Page, and the staff made their main opinions known in the AEW Redemption Hated & Loved column. So now, it’s time to assign winners and losers for the big show.
You probably know how this goes, but for the newbies, winners can sometimes be losers, losers can sometimes be winners, and sometimes things are exactly the way they look. That’s what this column is for: It’s a place where we can point out that The Young Bucks looked like geeks in victory, or that Kevin Knight lost like a winner, or that Willow Nightingale really is the winner she appears to be. As always, the comment section will be open to keep the conversation going.
Without further ado, the winners and losers from AEW Redemption in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Winner: Kevin Knight
AEW TNT Champion Kevin Knight isn’t quite a puppy, but he isn’t quite a Big Dog, yet. In this awkward, adolescent middle ground, nights like the one he had on Sunday are important. Knight went into the main event of AEW Redemption as a tomato can with a title belt. Not a single soul believed that he would disrupt the AEW dream match of Kenny Omega vs. Will Ospreay at next month’s All In.
He just had to prove he could hang, and prove himself he did. Knight went bell-to-bell with Kenny Omega and stayed competitive. You could see the world champion Knight could be in 2-4 years, maybe even sooner after this match.
He was buoyed by the fact that Tony Khan didn’t skirt the match down the card, assured of Knight’s defeat. Khan could’ve closed the show with a match that didn’t feel so much like a champion-vs-champion exhibition, but instead this was presented as a world title fight, treated like a world title fight, and Knight felt like all the bigger deal because of it.
He obviously has a feud with Mike Bailey waiting for him, but like Darby Allin before him, the TNT Title will catapult Knight to the top of the card sooner rather than later.
Loser: AEW Redemption, as a concept
Sometimes, you have a show that needs an arena, and the reach of worldwide PPV, and sometimes you have a booking contract with a venue, and a deal to broadcast whatever happens there, and you have to kinda just figure it out. The wrestling business see’s a lot of the latter, and AEW Redemption was no exception. This whole thing probably could’ve been a special presentation of “Dynamite” and “Collision.”
AEW has admittedly spoiled myself and the rest of the audience on a streak of really-good-to-great PPVs, and it was bound to end eventually. But with the streak behind us, and All In ahead of us, it did kinda feel like eating a very well made dinner roll in the middle of a marathon of different delicious cakes.
Maybe next year’s AEW Redemption benefits from the low bar that this perfectly cromulent inaugural PPV set, but it’s worth considering that stuffing one more PPV into the stretch between Double or Nothing and All In might be the issue. Forbidden Door at least absorbed the Owen Hart Finals to feel necessary. Redemption just felt like too much, and from the very good champion vs. champion main event to the Chris Jericho/Tommaso Ciampa plunderfest, there is nothing here that wouldn’t have been served better by being part of the weekly televised build to All In.
Winner: Willow Nightingale
Willow Nightingale is as much an AEW success story as MJF or any other “home grown” star. While Thekla has been a tremendous, entertaining champion, it’s always felt like Willow is meant to be the one Mercedes Mone faces at All In, and that just speaks to how far she’s come.
Willow will essentially be representing all of AEW as she faces Mone, who might be a member of the roster, but has always been in it for herself. She’s Darby Allin, she’s Hangman Page, she’s kind of the woman the promotion has been looking for this whole time. Britt Baker certainly had her time, as did Toni Storm, and other’s have tried to carry the women’s division, but now Willow is in a position to take up the AEW Women’s Division on her shoulders and carry it into Wembley Stadium.
If her performance on Sunday is any indication, I think she can do it. She has the bubbly poptimism of The Conglomeration, with the believability of a warrior, and now she’s finally at the top of the mountain, with nothing in the open sky to stop her ascent to greatness.
Losers: The Young Bucks
When a show like AEW Redemption already feels like a little too much on the calendar, the extraneous matches become even more boring. I think there were a lot of interesting ideas in the tag match between The Young Bucks and Jon Moxley and Will Ospreay. I think it served a perfectly good narrative role. I think that everyone did their best, but I think the match was also dead on arrival, and no amount of flips or community theater could distract from that.
It was one of the matches that suffered most from the previous “This Could’ve Been A Dynamite” of it all, but it really could have. I get that The Bucks need to be in place for some kind of showcase at All In, but I also just felt like the whole thing was about wheel-spinning. Ospreay and Moxley at least had a solid narrative arc throughout the match and the night, leaving Matt and Nick Jackson looking awkward. They won the match, but at the end of the night, the show was about Ospreay and Moxley. Their win was nothing more than a maguffin, an extraneous bit of hokum, built out of narrative necessity. It could’ve been any team.
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