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The G.O.A.T. 100 #64 | Kota Ibushi
Welcome to the G.O.A.T. 100 where we will count down with PWM wrestling historian Peter Edge the 100 greatest wrestlers of all time, based on many different stats and criteria. A new wrestler will be added on Mondays and Thursdays every week. Here is a link to an introduction essay with Peter explaining his GOAT100 concept. At the bottom of the article you can find the GOAT 100 Portal with links to all profiles so far published, as well as a visual key... Enjoy learning more about the history of our great hobby!
Kota Ibushi would start out with DDT Pro-Wrestling, with his first years following his debut in July 2004 seeing Kota excelling more in tag matches over singles. His most impressive early outing was a teaming with Kudo (the man he had his debut against) against KENTA and Naomichi Marufuji in the first round of the Differ Cup, a cross-promotional Junior Heavyweight Tag Tournament.
In DDT, singles success consisted of winning the Independent World Junior Heavyweight Title and the Ironman Heavymetalweight Title. The latter was DDT’s version of the 24/7 Title but more fun than the WWE’s version, with Kota joining over 500 title holders, including a cat, the Young Bucks autobiography, Vince McMahon’s Hollywood Walk of Fame star (ok, some champs were problematic) and the entire subscriber base of DDT’s YouTube channel, which technically makes me a wrestling champion!
But Ibushi’s coming-out party as a wrestler in a top-tier company came on 2007.7.15 with a NOAH Junior Heavyweight Tag League final match which saw Kota team with Naomichi Marufuji to wrestler KENTA and Taiji Ishimori – a MOTYC with a 9.43 on Cagematch and just a quarter star shy from getting five from Dave Meltzer, back when getting five stars was still a rarity.
The rest of the decade saw “notebook” matches in Dragon Gate, Pro Wrestling El Dorado, Ring of Honor, (El Generico on 08.4.19) NOAH, (The Briscoes with Katsuhiko Nakajima-2008.9.6) NJPW (Kanemoto-2009.5.30) and a fourway in Chikara against Generico, Nick Jackson and Jigsaw (2009.3.28) … with DDT seeing a match against a young Canadian upstart called Kenny Omega in a No-DQ 2 out of 3 Falls Match which saw a chemistry between the pair so undeniable that they began teaming under the name Golden Lovers, earning the first of what would be a shower of title wins coming on January 24th, with a win over Harashima and Toru Owashi to take the KO-D Tag Titles.
While the reign lasted just one title defence before losing to Dick Togo and Taka Michinoku, singles success continued with a first win of the KO-D Openweight Title, DDT’s main title. But even more important, tagging with Omega in NJPW for a sustained period of time gave Kota and his mate the opportunity to put themselves into the conversation for being among the Top 10 wrestlers in the world.
Matches against Apollo 55 (Prince Devitt and Rysuke Taguuchi) were all notebooks, and Kota would win the Best of Super Juniors in 2011, being the first non-NJPW contracted wrestler to win their late-Spring Juniors tournament, beating Prince Devitt to win both the tournament and the IWGP Junior title at Dominion. But that reign with the most prestigious lighter weight title in wrestling (along with his concurrent KO-D Tag Title reign with Kenny) ended prematurely after dislocating his right shoulder so severely that it kept him out for nine months. He would return at Dominion in a trios match with Kenny and Daisuke Sasaki against KUSHIDA, BUSHI and Prince Devitt. After his team's victory, a singles challenge was laid out to compete for the belt he’d never been beaten for, now held by Low Ki.
Their July 29th match was won by Kota, but the belt was lost back to Ki in October. By Wrestle Kingdom time, Ibushi challenged for the Jr. Heavyweight Title again, by now with Devitt as the champion and with Low Ki also in the three-way match. Low Ki would make the match infamous by not only coming out in cosplay as the main character in the video game Hitman but also wrestling in the shirt, braces and dress slacks – a move that hadn't run by NJPW in advance, and pee’d them off so much that Low Ki ended up being done with the company.
Kota would continue to wrestle in DDT as well, with the most memorable match being held in Budokan Hall – a match with Omega so spectacular, yet so out of control that Ibushi got himself banned from Budokan after ignoring the arena management’s warning that he shouldn’t do a moonsault off the balcony… but it also led to internet buzz about Kota reaching its highest. It’s one of only 82 matches to get above 9.50 on Cagematch, the highest of any match that year, even higher than the Tanahashi / Suzuki 5-star match. It finished 7th in the MOTY award in the Observer awards – and yet Dave Meltzer didn’t rate it at all. Guess UFC had a PPV that week.
Kota would be a surprise entrant into the 2013 G1, with a tournament match against Shinsuke Nakamura being a MOTYC on his way to a 4-5 record in Block B. But the appearance in the annual summer singles tournament didn’t mean Kota was the exclusive property of NJPW. Kota was still a DDT guy, but would wrestle one shots in New Japan, even get Kazuchika Okada onto a DDT show in the first ever Okada / Ibushi match. He and Omega held the tag and trios titles simultaneously in DDT and when the pair dropped the belts, Okada’s regained focus on singles gold saw a third KO-D Title.reign after beating Harashima on February 2014 – a reign that lasted 73 days before losing the title back to Harashima. But his NJPW commitments (which saw him sign a dual contract, making him the first Japanese star to have such a deal with two companies) brought him greater fame.
Kota won the IWGP junior heavyweight belt from Prince Devitt (now in his Bullet Club era) at Wrestle Kingdom 8. In the annual tradition at the Anniversary show, the junior champ would face the heavyweight champ, that being Kazuchika Okada, again losing to the Rainmaker.
His third reign as champion would end at Dominion to KUSHIDA in which Kota would suffer a concussion during the unsuccessful title defence meaning the big coming out party for Kota as now a permanent heavyweight had to be delayed.
That announcement would have to wait until October of 2014 along with an announcement that Kota had signed a one-year extension to the contract he signed the previous year in conjunction with his DDT contract.
This announcement would be on the night he confronted Shinsuke Nakamura and challenged him to a match for Naka's IC Title at Wrestle Kingdom. That match would be the 2015 Voices of Wrestling MOTY in what was the second incarnation of what is an annual tradition in wrestling circles (I’m not biased at all about it’s importance because I’m a voter on it) and the MOTY in the Observer Awards for that year as well.
A New Japan Cup win earned Ibushi the right to challenge for the IWGP Heavyweight Title held by AJ Styles who was the leader of the Bullet Club faction that was dominating NJPW and its main event scene. Their match would be most remembered for the final act and in particular for the involvement of Kenny Omega. While non-physical, his actions indicated a shift in dynamic between Kota and his former Golden Lover.
With AJ in trouble and Kota looking to capitalize with the Phoenix Splash, Omega, who had joined Bullet Club months before, stepped onto the apron and their eyes met. Time stands still for a moment. Kota seeing his best friend – who had never betrayed him specifically, but was now associated with his enemies – paused and hesitated, leaving an opening for A.J. to exploit which led to Ibushi’s defeat.
This led to…. nothing, for the time being. Kota and Kenny went about their business. Kenny would dominate the Jr. Heavyweight scene. While Kota would go on to a 4-5 record at the G1 later on in 2015. Yano would finish higher than Kota in Block A…. YANO!!!!!
Ibushi had to be sidelined due to a cervical disc herniation, but during this time Kota announced that he was leaving NJPW and DDT because he felt he couldn’t hold up to the two schedules of the companies he was working for. Back as a freelancer, Ibushi still took dates with DDT and also spent time in the US wrestling for Evolve… and as Evolve co-founder Gabe Sapolsky had by then taken the red pill and become a WWE employee, he must have been the one to give Ibushi front-row tickets to NXT Takeover in Dallas on Mania 32 weekend.
Such a moment when a wrestler is filmed in the front row of a Takeover, it means he has signed for WWE and will spend the first few months in Orlando and the Performance Center to learn the WWE playbook. But Ibushi never actually signed a contract. He was part of the 32-man field that made up the Cruiserweight Classic and while in Orlando for the Classic, he wrestled on NXT against Buddy Murphy. Guess he couldn’t kick his love of Kenny.
Victories over Sean Maluta, Cedric Alexander and Brian Kenderick put Kota into the final four due to be shown live on the WWE Network. In the gap between the tapings for the early rounds and the final four, PW Torch “broke” that Ibushi was signed by WWE but that was denied by Kota, saying that he hadn't even been offered a contract. WWE signee TJ Perkins ended up beating Ibushi in the semi-finals. Kota also took part in the Dusty Classic, originally partnered with TAFKA KENTA, now Hideo Itami but an Itami injury meant Kota was now paired with his conqueror in the Cruiser semis TJP. They would lose in the final four of the tag tourney to Alexander Wolfe and Sawyer Fulton. That would be the final time Kota would take part in any fed-related activity.
The obvious thing to say is “phew”. I’ve heard people say that Kota would have been one of the 24/7 geeks that ran around RAW in the late 2010’s until Paul Levesque got the book to write WWE main roster TV. I don’t think that would have been the case but I also don’t think he would have thrived. Kota and WWE go together like custard and eggs– it does make you curious, but you know the final result won’t end well.
After 6 months as a freelancer, Ibushi decided to find a place to stay and took out a mortgage with New Japan. First appearing on the dark match of the King of Pro Wrestling show under the Tiger Mask mask working as Tiger Mask W, it was unmistakable that it was Kota Ibushi under the mask. The first question that would have been asked by fans would have been “why is this Kota Ibushi shaped man wearing the Tiger Mask mask?” This conceit carried on until the 45th Anniversary show where Tiger Mask W faced Kazuchika Okada, the IWGP Heavyweight Champ and lost in a very good match, as you would expect from Kota and Kaz.
No unmasking happened and Kota would next be on NJPW screens at the 2017 G1 with NJPW television saying it was Kota’s return after 2 years not acknowledging that a Kota Ibushi sized man had been under the Tiger hood at any point in the last year. Such was the standard of New Japan at this time that Kota’s six notebook matches in this G1 didn’t make him the guy with the most in July/August. That moniker went to Tomohiro Ishii with seven.
Teases of Kota vs Kenny at the twelfth iteration of Wrestle Kingdom in the aftermath of Omega’s final loss to Tetsuya Naito never came to fruition with Kenny involved in a dream match vs Chris Jericho, while Cody Rhodes – involved in an attempt at a Bullet Club coup d’état so obvious that you'd imagine that JD Vance would be taking notes for the years to come, (this will age brilliantly in 2027 when JD and his armed militia execute Donald Trump live on OAN) – would challenge Kota for a match on the same night as the battle of Winnipeg between Omega and Jericho.
Kota would beat Cody Rhodes at Wrestle Kingdom XII despite a CrossRhodes from the apron to the outside which Kota took how you imagine he took it. (Like a man whose archenemy is his own neck.) The next night at New Year’s Dash, Cody was looking for revenge, and with a steel chair in hand looked ready to take Ibushi to concussion city … until Kenny ran in and stopped anything from happening. When Cody turned on Kenny the next month and no-one from his brethren was going to save him, one person did. Kota Ibushi made the save, chasing Cody and Hangman Page (2025 Hanger would be ashamed of 2018 Page for taking Cody's side) away from the ring and reuniting with his best friend.
The Golden Lovers would have ****+ matches with Cody and Hangman Page and Cody and Marty Scurll and a MOTYC against The Young Bucks in Southern California. While Kota would team with Kenny and members of Bullet Club sympathetic to Kenny in the ongoing BC civil war, he would never be listed as an official Bullet Club member… (yet Jeff Jarrett is!) Kota was in his partner’s corner when Kenny won the IWGP Heavyweight Title beating Kazuchika Okada and then was placed in the same block as the champion in the 28th G1 Climax.
The 2018 G1 Climax would be up to that point not just the greatest G1 ever, but the greatest wrestling tournament of all time. Every wrestler bar Bad Luck Fale, Toru Yano and Tama Tonga had six matches over 3 stars, which is paramount to Leicester’s 2015/16 Premier League title win in terms of overachievement. 39 matches in all were notebook, 23 of them in Block B which featured Kota, Kenny, Zack Sabre Jr., Tetsuya Naito and Tomohiro Ishii. Take away Yano and Tonga and Block B sees 82% of its matches get 4 stars+.
The Kota vs Kenny match would be in the final matchday of the block stage in Block A, with Kenny at 6-2 (12pts) and Kota at 5-3 (10pts). The maths would be simple in the final match of the block stage – if Kota beats Kenny, he ties with him on points, but the head-to-head win acts as the tie-breaker, and it's Kota who would advance to the finals. This momentous match would be both NJPW’s first show in Budokan Hall for 15 years, and Kota’s first back since being banned from the building after the incident at the Kenny Omega match in 2012.
The ban would be rescinded just in time for the final three nights of the G1 at Budokan Hall and the attraction that Kenny vs Kota was could be seen in the ticket sales, with the final night of Block B doubling the number for Block A’s final night which only saw 6,180 tickets sold, even with a Tanahashi vs Okada main event.
At *****½ from Dave Meltzer and a 9.58 from Cagematch, many see it as one of the greatest ever G1 matches. Ibushi would win the match to get that slot in the final against Hiroshi Tanahashi with that match being even better… with the only reason it didn’t win MOTY honours across the board being that the all-timer Okada/Omega IV had just happened two months earlier. I think that the final against Tanahashi is the greatest G1 match ever.
While Kota would lose the final to Hiroshi, it was obvious that Ibushi was now one of the top stars of the company. A trilogy of matches between Naito and Ibushi followed and would see the kind of bumping that people bring out their inner-Helen Lovejoy and ask them to “please, think of the children”. Dave Meltzer even refused to rate their third match at Dominion 6.9 not wanting to encourage them. The infamous match included a spot in which Naito hit a German suplex from the apron to the outside, but on the way Kota hit his head on said apron. The way Kota’s head turned on impact made everyone worry about Kota and his neck – but as it turned out, he was alright. Maybe the zombie spot that Kota does (no-selling the offence of his opponent) is actually a shoot, and Ibushi is literally a zombie that can't feel pain?
Ibushi’s 2019 G1 somehow saw him better the number of his notebook matches from the previous year, producing nine ****+ matches, with only the match against Bad Luck Fale not hitting the four star mark. (Only Okada has ever dragged that bloke to a **** match.) That G1 would overtake 2018 for total notebook matches with 47 – with Block A standouts Kota, Okada, Ospreay, Tanahashi, Sabre Jr. and a returning to puro KENTA playing their part leading to 26 of the 36 matches in that block getting ****+.
Ibushi’s A-Block victory over Kazuchika Okada put him into the final and in a breathtaking final match that played every bit of emotion out of the fans, Kota beat Jay White in a Top-10 MOTY to wave that flag and go to the Dome to wrestle for the IWGP Title.
On what would be the first of an eventual three two-night Wrestle Kingdoms (an idea that inspired WrestleMania to go two nights) Ibushi would face Okada in the main event for the IWGP title – part of Okada's two-night mission to merge the “World” and Intercontinental Titles – in a five-star classic. Kota would lose on this night and would go on to lose to Jay White, the loser of the night-one IC Title contest to Naito, in the night-two unofficial third-place playoff to finish 4th in a 4-man field.
Ibushi would spend the majority of 2020 teaming with Tanahashi, calling themselves Golden Ace, winning the tag titles and embarking on a feud with Dangerous Tekkers, Taichi and Zack Sabre Jr. in the early days of the empty-arena / clap-crowd era of NJPW.
Ibushi would win the following year's tournament, giving him back-to-back G1 victories, in the autumn of 2020, with only Ishii getting more “notebooks” in a G1 that saw the amount of 4-star matches decrease rapidly with wrestlers still trying to figure out how to put together matches for the new environment, and clap crowds being just as detrimental to the NJPW product as that louder-than-necessary soundtrack would be to Oppenheimer. Little did we know that the clap crowd would carry on for another two years and that Kota Ibushi’s appearance at Korakuen Hall to wrestle in Manabu Nakanishi’s retirement match would end up his last New Japan match in front of a full crowd that could fully make noise.
Jay White would actually beat Ibushi to take the briefcase and have the chance to face IWGP Champion Tetsuya Naito in the Dome but as it was a two-night Wrestle Kingdom, the booking saw Naito just say (I’m paraphrasing here) “I’ll face you on Night 1 and the winner faces Jay on Night 2”. In reflection this is the first real case of Gedo losing his mojo as a booker with no real justification to giving Kota his opportunity to face the champion in storyline after White had beaten Ibushi, even with his feet on the ropes in the pinfall.
Ibushi would beat Naito to win his first IWGP crown (and IC Title) and then beat White on Night Two in matches that didn't live up to the five-star ratings that Big Dave gave them – partly thanks to the lack of atmosphere.
The reign Kota would embark on would be weird. Not because it was bad but because it was just weird.
Ibushi in interviews, expressed a wish to unify the two titles and on March 1st the IWGP and IC Titles were unified as one and a IWGP World Heavyweight Championship was formed.
Let’s take emphasis on the word World. The IWGP Title had been a S Tier Title from the day it started as a lineal title from 1987 – after a few years of being the trophy for the annual Heavyweight singles title. It didn’t need the World tag, but apparently it did?
And after Kota beat El Desperado at the 49th Anniversary Show, the new IWGP World Heavyweight Title belt got its first airing and it was universally critically unacclaimed with comparisons of the design to the WWE Divas Championship warranted. That match, looking back as part of my research for this piece, has its soundtrack dominated by the English language commentary by Chris Charlton shitting on Kota for the idea of having a “World Title” saying that if they could have been able to make noise would be behind Despy instead of one of the most beloved figures in New Japan’s last decade.
Whether that’s Chris doing head canon stuff is something I don’t have word capacity for but it adds to the weirdness of it all.
What was shocking was how quickly it all ended. Will Ospreay would win the World Title on the first defence Kota had with the belt that the redesign was associated with him. The 2021 G1 would see Kota get to his fourth consecutive finals, the most in a row that a single wrestler has ever achieved in G1 history (at least under that branding) but 25 minutes into the match, Kota would suffer a shoulder separation when a planned spot in which a Kota Phoenix Splash on his finals opponent Okada would see Kazuchika move and Ibushi eat mat, leading to Kota landing awkwardly and suffering the injury.
Kota has only wrestled 23 more matches since and none of them for NJPW. He and New Japan fell out dramatically with tweet storms from Kota alleging yakuza involvement in Bushiroad, (the owners of NJPW at the time) and talking about his mother trying to unalive herself – blaming Yuichi Kikuchi, going as far as to accuse Yuichi of bullying him through text messaging and also blaming President Takami Ohbani for the events that happened.
Ibushi would leave NJPW when his contract expired in February 2023.
His first matches since that G1 Final were during the GCW Collective with a match at Bloodsport against Mike Bailey and Joey Janela on Janela’s Spring Break event. Ibushi would then appear on AEW, making his bow at the Blood and Guts match with the Elite in their feud-ending match against the Blackpool Combat Club on July 19, 2023, also making an appearance at All In at Wembley the following month with Omega and Hangman Adam Page against Jay White, Juice Robinson and Konosuke Takeshita.
But this wasn’t the same Kota Ibushi. That much was magnified at 3.0 size with the horrible match against Naomichi Marufuji on NOAH’s Jan 2nd show which saw Ibushi with an ankle broken before the show in training somehow let out there and the result being 33 minutes of misery.
A return to DDT lasted two matches before Kota left after a falling out between Kota and some of the younger talent on the DDT roster after they made comments to Kota that he found disrespectful and a lack of apology from said wrestlers saw Ibushi leave.
A tour of various Japanese indies preceded a return to AEW where he was part of the main event of Forbidden Door at the O2 Arena where he teamed with Darby Allin, Tanahashi, Ospreay and Omega to face The Death Riders in a Cage Match. But then a couple of months later, he broke his femur in a match against Josh Alexander on the 8th October, 2025, episode of Collision. He hasn’t wrestled since and I don’t think he ever will. At least he shouldn’t.
The years before the pandemic are what we should remember him best for. The early 2010’s saw Kota as one of the kings of the air, along with Ricochet and the late PAC. Not many others have joined the rarified air that makes the S Tier of high-flyers in the 21st century.
Ibushi was one of the best of this generation. Not many have been better than him in the last decade. Not many could outpace him. Not many could put on the matches Kota Ibushi put on. Unfortunately, Kota was probably the guy that got messed around most by the pandemic that messed up the whole world for a period of time.
Shall we just remember the good times?
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