Tonight All Elite Wrestling will be hosting Blood and Guts on AEW Dynamite in First Horizon Coliseum in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Blood and Guts was supposed to first happen in 2020, advertised as The Elite versus Inner Circle on March 25, 2020 in Newark, New Jersey. The pandemic essentially stopped it from happening. The first would end up happening in 2021 between The Pinnacle and Inner Circle in Jacksonville, Florida for a pandemic crowd. It will unfortunately be best remembered for a poorly edited final moment.
The first in front of a live audience would be in June of 2022 the next year, at Little Caesars Arena in Detroit, Michigan. It was the debut for AEW in Detroit and the first Blood and Guts in front of a large capacity audience. I was at the event. The match was fantastic between Blackpool Combat Club and the Jericho Appreciation Society. The finish of Eddie Kingston’s chance at victory (he was the MVP of the match) being stolen by Claudio Castagnoli getting a tap out first right at the top of the cage was fantastic. While Sammy Guevara took a lot of attention with the top of the cage bump, I thought Angelo Parker was lowkey the best of his team.
2023 would see the match take place in Boston, Massachusetts in July, seeing The Golden Elite take on Blackpool Combat Club. In-ring action wise it was a bit better than the 2022 edition but I think it was missing the internal drama that we saw from BCC and Eddie Kingston coming together. It did at least have a great finish of Jon Moxley submitting to save Wheeler Yuta.
Next they went to Nashville in 2024, for a Blood and Guts between Team AEW and The Elite. The drama surrounding was Hangman Adam Page temporarily joining The Elite again just to get his hands on Swerve Strickland on Team AEW. Adding Darby Allin to the match was great as he was born to take part in matches like this. The Elite as the big bads in AEW didn’t last much longer after this match and a big part of it was their reluctance to let Jack Perry be set on fire for the cause. It would only be a few weeks later we saw Swerve and Hangman go to the lengths the Elite refused to go in their unsanctioned match at All Out.
Blood and Guts 2025
Now we have two Blood and Guts matches on the same night, as the women finally get to have their shot at it. The women in AEW have already built a reputation for themselves of having some of their best matches in big gimmick hardcore matches so we’ve been asking for this for quite some time. The women will get a six on six while the men get a five on five.
The women’s match would be first announced but the participants would be held off, mostly because AEW dealt with a lot of injuries. We don’t know who the original teams were planned to be, but we do know of folks like Queen Aminata unable to compete due to injury. Penelope Ford was also likely to be in it as Megan Bayne’s partner. Those two injuries likely led to spots for Harley Cameron and Marina Shafir.
It’s tough to say how the match will end up going. It’s a new environment for a lot of them, and a lot of these women are only a few years into their career. That mystery could go either way. Not saying it will end up bad because as I established earlier, women in AEW have great hardcore matches. They are good with these plunder matches. It’s a specialty for All Elite Wrestling. Blood and Guts is quite possibly the ultimate plunder match for the company, to the benefit or detriment of the gimmick (more on that later) so if they lean on that direction? I think it’ll work out for the competitors.
As for the men, we get the Death Riders on one side with several veterans of the match. Wheeler Yuta, Jon Moxley, and Claudio Castagnoli, and Daniel Garcia have had two of the four B&G’s, while PAC has one. On the other side, Mark Briscoe and Darby Allin were in last years, while the other three are fresh. Roderick Strong and Kyle O’Reilly do have experience in a similar match as each took part in four NXT WarGames as members of Undisputed ERA. That experience will do The Conglomeration some good. I’m not sure where the men go that’s anywhere new to where they’ve gone in the past, and that leads to some thoughts about the gimmick itself.
What is Blood and Guts?
Usually you ask a question like this before going over the history or the current match, but I think it’s important to ask now. We know it’s a WarGames/Match From Beyond with a name that came from something Vince McMahon tried to say about AEW violence. But what is it really?
In the past, WarGames was a battle between the top babyfaces and top heels that didn’t need the plunder and weapons. It was all about the in-ring action and the constant drama of handicap situations. It usually started with heels coming out first after the starting one on one so the babyfaces were constantly having in a disadvantage. Once the final wrestler came in and the door was closed, the heels no longer had their advantages and it was all about building up to that finish where someone gave up. Much like a hot tag, it’s all built to create tension until you see the big fire comeback.
We didn’t have WarGames for years due to WCW going out of business, though Major League Wrestling did try to temporarily resurrect it at one point (they sold the name back to WWE and now call their match War Chamber) but the real spiritual successor in the 2000s was TNA Wrestling LockDown. TNA had the Lethal Lockdown, which essentially was a multi wrestler cage match where at the end they would bring down the ceiling for the Match From Beyond portion. At some point they added weapons dangling from the ceiling, which is where the match started to become a plunder fest.
This moved into NXT doing their own version of WarGames (best known for William Regal shouting WARGAMES which seems to be the only thing anyone remembers from those) which shared more from TNA than the JCP/WCW matches. Heavy on weapons, heavy on plunder. Don’t ask me which one, but one of my only memories of those matches were at one point they brought out a bunch of tables and did a bunch of contrived table spots. Great use of the cage.
All Elite Wrestling now has their Blood and Guts, and those matches try to take from everything. They try to play to the history of the old Jim Crockett Promotions WarGames matches, especially in the art and promotion, but they also often fall into the plunder weapon spots that NXT and TNA get into. It’s almost expected now for someone to bring in some thumbtacks, glass, something.
The other issue is that AEW has this match that’s all about locking their opponents up in a double ring double cage and yet every match relies heavily on spots designed with the wrestlers getting out of the cage and climbing on top. Everyone wants to see the wrestlers escape for the big spots on top. And I get it! I loved seeing the giant swing by Claudio on top of the Blood and Guts cage! For a live audience it’s incredible. I’m sure it’s incredible on TV as well, but it really hurts the purpose of the match. This is about caged animals unsanctioned trying to destroy each other. Once you’re crawling in and out of it? It loses the magic a bit. Or maybe? That’s just what Blood and Guts is to a 2025 audience. That’s just what WarGames is now.
Matches From Beyond
I personally feel like the women’s match should lean into the violence and plunder. Let them go all out. Give people what they wanted to see. They want to see these women go all out with weapons, blood, and big spots. Don’t hold them back.
But the men? I would love to see if they kept it a bit more simple. Darby Allin I’m sure is going to do crazy Darby things, but you really don’t need Kyle O’Reilly and Roderick Strong doing wacky gimmick spots. Let’s see something more grounded in pro wrestling for this. Make the violence being inside that cage against the Death Riders.
I’m not going to expect it because Jon Moxley is just as much a violent weapon merchant as anyone in the business, but he’s also the best merchant there is. He’s the Lord of War essentially for pro wrestling, so I don’t see him shying away from weapons. I just think it would create a nice contrast from the women’s match. Let the women go crazy with weapons and spots and going to the outside. Give them all the room. But the men? Give me something more concentrated with the violence.
The show currently looks like it’ll do over 5,000 and likely draw better than Nashville, which barely broke 5,000. Boston did close to 9,000 and Detroit did 11,500, so just “stopping the bleeding” and doing better than last year is a good sign to me. You can’t expect them to do better than the Detroit debut, especially with how the build up to this was handled, and it no longer being a summer event. Who knows how much Ric Flair and Ricky Steamboat will make an impact showing up. Probably for the best this is the last time AEW tries to drag out Ric Flair for things like this.
Going into 2026, I wonder how AEW should look at Blood and Guts. Should it be this TV event? Should it maybe become a special on HBO Max? Maybe a full pay per view? With the men and women now involved, should it be a one time TV show or should they strategically build up to this match in feuds and then promote the men and women separately?
It’s also interesting to run it in North Carolina in November, the same month WWE is running Survivor Series: WarGames in California. It’ll be hard not to compare the two. That show will also have both men and women’s matches, with Cody Rhodes in the men’s match. Cody never got to do Blood and Guts when he was supposed to be in the first. Is he going to push it to be more like the match his father helped conceive, or is he going to just do the typical Triple H NXT WarGames match?
I would rather not compare it to the plastic WWE version, but AEW is pushing this comparison themselves by moving their Blood and Guts from a summer spectacle to before Full Gear. AEW tonight is going to have to make sure above match philosophy they deliver the way AEW can deliver better than anyone else on U.S. cable television in wrestling: by providing the best pro wrestling, and providing a match that respects the violence of the Match From Beyond.
Photo by Aaron Wrotkowski
