AEW Redemption: Biggest Winners & Losers

The inaugural AEW Redemption took place in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, last night. With only a month until All In, the show fit a weird slot within the AEW calendar, because it did more to set the table for August’s massive show, than it did to face by itself. We have already gone over what happened on the AEW Redemption – 7/26/2026 Results Page, and the staff made their fundamental opinions known within the AEW Redemption Hated & Loved column. So now, it is time to assign winners and losers for the large show.

You most likely know the way this goes, but for the newbies, winners can sometimes be losers, losers can sometimes be winners, and sometimes things are exactly the way in which they appear. That is what this column is for: It’s a spot where we are able to indicate 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 all the time, the comment section can be open to maintain the conversation going.

Without further ado, the winners and losers from AEW Redemption in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

AEW TNT Champion Kevin Knight is not quite a puppy, but he is not quite a Big Dog, yet. On this awkward, adolescent middle ground, nights just like the one he had on Sunday are vital. Knight went into the fundamental 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 needed to prove he could hang, and prove himself he did. Knight went bell-to-bell with Kenny Omega and stayed competitive. You may see the world champion Knight may very well be in 2-4 years, perhaps even sooner after this match.

He was buoyed by the proven fact that Tony Khan didn’t skirt the match down the cardboard, assured of Knight’s defeat. Khan could’ve closed the show with a match that did not feel so very like a champion-vs-champion exhibition, but as an alternative this was presented as a world title fight, treated like a world title fight, and Knight felt like all the larger deal due to 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 highest of the cardboard sooner moderately than later.

Sometimes, you may have a show that needs an arena, and the reach of worldwide PPV, and sometimes you may have a booking contract with a venue, and a deal to broadcast whatever happens there, and you may have to kinda just figure it out. The wrestling business see’s quite 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 remaining of the audience on a streak of really-good-to-great PPVs, and it was certain to finish eventually. But with the streak behind us, and All In ahead of us, it did kinda feel like eating a thoroughly made dinner roll in the course of a marathon of various delicious cakes.

Perhaps next 12 months’s AEW Redemption advantages from the low bar that this perfectly cromulent inaugural PPV set, but it surely’s value considering that stuffing yet one more PPV into the stretch between Double or Nothing and All In is perhaps the difficulty. Forbidden Door at the least absorbed the Owen Hart Finals to feel essential. Redemption just felt like an excessive amount of, and from the excellent champion vs. champion fundamental event to the Chris Jericho/Tommaso Ciampa plunderfest, there may be nothing here that would not have been served higher by being a part of the weekly televised construct to All In.

Willow Nightingale is as much an AEW success story as MJF or every other “home grown” star. While Thekla has been an amazing, entertaining champion, it is often felt like Willow is supposed 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 is perhaps a member of the roster, but has all the time been in it for herself. She’s Darby Allin, she’s Hangman Page, she’s form of the girl the promotion has been in search of this whole time. Britt Baker actually had her time, as did Toni Storm, and other’s have tried to hold the ladies’s division, but now Willow is able 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 believe she will do it. She has the bubbly poptimism of The Conglomeration, with the believability of a warrior, and now she’s finally at the highest of the mountain, with nothing within the open sky to stop her ascent to greatness.

When a show like AEW Redemption already seems like a bit an excessive amount of on the calendar, the extraneous matches develop into much more boring. I believe there have been quite a lot of interesting ideas within the tag match between The Young Bucks and Jon Moxley and Will Ospreay. I believe it served a wonderfully good narrative role. I believe that everybody did their best, but I believe the match was also dead on arrival, and no amount of flips or community theater could distract from that.

It was one in all the matches that suffered most from the previous “This Could’ve Been A Dynamite” of all of it, but it surely really could have. I get that The Bucks have to be in place for some form of showcase at All In, but I also just felt like the entire thing was about wheel-spinning. Ospreay and Moxley at the 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 top of the night, the show was about Ospreay and Moxley. Their win was nothing greater than a maguffin, an extraneous little bit of hokum, built out of narrative necessity. It could’ve been any team.