AEW All In 2026 was a major success for the company, highlighted by great matches, title changes, and surprises. One of the most interesting moments came at the end of the Men’s Tag Team Championship bout, itself a dream match in which Cope and Christian Cage fended off a challenge from The Young Bucks.
The two iconic teams were joined by FTR, The Motor City Machine Guns, and The New Level. The moment felt like a statement from AEW as the five teams on screen represented truly some of the best tag teams in wrestling, each veterans with long histories and, collectively, not all that many matches against one another.
While there are many debatable points regarding how AEW stacks up against WWE or other promotions, it’s hard to deny that their tag team division is positively stacked and there are some key scenarios that should play out in the months ahead.
New Level Dream Matches
Cope and Christian Cage feuding with FTR and beating The Young Bucks at All In represented dream match scenarios. Indeed Cope and Cage are veterans whose heyday as a tag team arguably came a solid twenty-five years ago. Seeing them clash with top teams, not to mention holding their own in the ring, has been a joy for long-time fans to see.
While New Level hasn’t been around as long as Cope and Cage, they do have a solid decade of history behind them. That’s not to mention that, in being firmly rooted in WWE, they haven’t clashed with the best teams from outside the promotion.
Yes, New Level vs. The Revival has happened, and Kofi and Austin Creed had one, fleeting, untelevised six-man tag team bout opposite The Motor City Machine Guns in WWE earlier this year. Otherwise, though? New Level vs. Young Bucks stands alongside The Usos vs. The Young Bucks as the ultimate modern era, interpromotional tag team dream match.
Likewise New Level vs. Cope and Christian registers as exactly the kind of bout longtime fans might fantasy book, but never would’ve dreamed they’d actually see until quite recently.
Cope and Christian only have but so much time left in the ring and The Young Bucks have recently teased retirement. The New Level themselves aren’t exactly a young team and AEW should absolutely take advantage of an opportunity to crank out some dream scenarios with them.
Something Like The Glory Days Of TLC
A key, often underrated element of WWE’s Attitude Era’s success came down to the depth of the tag team division. With Edge and Christian, The Hardy Boyz, and The Dudley Boyz anchoring the division, and very good teams like The APA, Too Cool, and The Hollys working right underneath them, there was a steady stream of different permutations of teams to delight fans with different kinds of chemistry and styles of performance.
TLC was a recurring anchor to the proceedings as the core three headliner teams repeatedly put on chaotic spectacles that revolutionized the Ladder Match concept. The collective star power, complementary skills of the pairs set up this magic.
With five great teams that have fans invested, not to mention other pairings like Brodido, The Gunns, and representatives of The Hurt Syndicate to mix in, AEW can stage some electric multi-team scenarios. A variation on TLC may not be the exact answer, but finding ways to spotlight more than two teams at a time, then filter back to traditional tag bouts can add longevity to AEW’s storytelling in the tag division, and set them up for something special.
Make A New Star Tag Team
If there’s a con to AEW’s tag team division as it stands, it’s that it does skew heavily toward veteran talent. Between the five tag teams that filled the ring at All In, it’s telling that Nick Jackson was the youngest at 37, joining Cash Wheeler and Austin Creed as the only men out there under 40. (Throw in the Hurt Syndicate, and the scales tip even further with a fifty and fifty-one year old added to the mix.)
Adam Copeland and Christian are prime examples that age is just a number and with the right combination of factors, talents can keep wrestling at a high level into their fifties. Even so, there’s little denying that the tag division should be looking to the future.
So it is that one priority should be for this iconic slate of teams to not only stage classic bouts and dream matches with each other, but be sure to put over some of the twenty-somethings waiting in the wings. Indeed, there’s nothing like a veteran act fans are already invested in to ensure newer talents, too, start feeling like a bigger deal.
