Will Ospreay has racked up 57 five-star matches under Dave Meltzer’s rating system, but he insists that number isn’t something he’s actively chasing every time he steps in the ring.
Speaking with Chris Van Vliet, Ospreay admitted he’d genuinely lost track of his own total. He knew he had 25 back in 2023 and 47 by their next conversation, but had no idea it had climbed to 57 until Van Vliet told him.
That reputation, he acknowledged, does create pressure, since even a perfectly good match can feel like a letdown against his own track record.
Oh, I don’t know how many I’ve got now.
Rather than trying to top himself every night, Ospreay said this year in particular he’s leaned more into being a storyteller than into chasing show-stealing performances, while still trusting that he can turn it on for a genuine five-star effort when the moment calls for it.
Sometimes I do, but, like, I feel like a lot of this year I haven’t needed to be the five-star guy. I’ve needed to be kind of like a little bit of a storyteller guy.
He pointed to his work with Swerve Strickland as one recent example. He was clear that he doesn’t structure his matches around earning another rating, even though he has his own internal sense of what a five-star performance looks like for him.
And then when it’s time for me to do, like, the five stars, I bust it out. Like, for example, I think I’ve got one with Swerve. Like, I think so, maybe. But, like, I think that was the only one that I had until then.
That internal standard shifts depending on the story already built into a match, and he noted that sometimes a great match doesn’t need much story at all, pointing to a famous Dragon Gate six-man tag where the in-ring action alone made the match unforgettable.
For Ospreay, the takeaway isn’t about reaching number 58 and it’s about recognizing when a match actually calls for that level of performance and when it doesn’t.
