Start on Cagematch, open the wrestler’s profile, read the match-by-match results list, and write the whole thing into a spreadsheet in date order. Then repeat the lookup on WrestlingData and one more database, and escalate anything they disagree about to a dated source. That is the whole method. The work is in the reconciliation, not in the searching.
This article is about professional wrestling. If you landed here looking for high school or NCAA season records, the databases below will not help you, because the two sports keep completely separate statistics.
There is no official record book in pro wrestling, and the free databases disagree with each other about dates, results, and occasionally whether a match happened at all. Practitioners on r/SquaredCircle treat Cagematch as the default starting point and WrestlingData as the second opinion. Wikipedia’s WikiProject Professional wrestling talk archives go further, treating match databases as the box score of wrestling research while refusing to use them for news or signings.
Table of Contents
- What You Need to Research a Wrestler’s Full Match History
- Step-by-Step
- Step 1: Define the Career and Match Scope
- Step 2: Start with a Central Wrestler Record
- Step 3: Build the Match List Chronologically
- Step 4: Verify Results Against Independent Sources
- Step 5: Resolve Duplicates, Missing Data, and Name Changes
- Step 6: Audit and Present the Final History
- Common Mistakes
- Frequently Asked Questions
- What is the best site for researching a wrestler’s full match history?
- How do I count tournament and battle royal matches in a wrestler’s record?
- Is Cagematch accurate and complete for every professional wrestler?
- How do I research a wrestler who changed names or worked in different promotions?
- What should I do when two wrestling sources list different results for the same match?
- Conclusion
What You Need to Research a Wrestler’s Full Match History
Before you open a single tab, decide what a complete record means to you. Seven fields turn a list of results into something you can actually cite.
| Field | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Promotion | Independent, major and Japanese cards are counted differently by everyone |
| Event | Several cards share a name across different years |
| Date | Tape date and air date are often not the same, and one of them is usually wrong |
| Opponent or team | Tag and multi-man bouts have to be credited correctly |
| Result | Win, loss, draw, time-limit draw, no contest |
| Stipulation | Singles, tag, handicap, gauntlet, battle royal |
| Title involved | Needed for reign lists and lineage |
On the source side you want six things: a wrestler profile page with a stable database ID, official promotion results or listings, at least two independent databases, an archive service for dead links, a spreadsheet or timeline document, and somewhere to log source links and open questions. Match video is the fallback of last resort, and for pre-1985 careers, print.
No single site lays out how the main databases differ side by side, which is why this comparison is worth reading closely before you commit to one source for a whole career.
| Database | Strength | Weakness | Cite it for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cagematch | Deepest match-by-match coverage, filters by promotion, year and stip type | Dates go wrong on multi-night events taped out of broadcast order | Match participation, stipulations, promotion totals |
| WrestlingData | Clean career summaries and title history, useful cross-check | Less complete on independent and non-US cards | Second-source confirmation of results and reigns |
| Online World of Wrestling | Long-running biographies and event archives | Widely regarded as unreliable for citation in the practitioner talk archives | Background reading only |
| Internet Wrestling Database | Interviews, photos, career context | Less reliable for exact dates and finishes | Context, not numbers |
| profightdb | Widely accepted for who, what, when and result | Explicitly not trusted for exact tape dates | Overall career record, promotion history |
| Slam! Sports archive | Historically one of the most important reliable sources | Large numbers of dead links, and the Wayback Machine does not hold everything | Contemporary reporting, via archive recovery |
One last piece of kit matters more than people expect: a column in your spreadsheet called source and confidence. Most research disputes are not about a wrestler at all. They are about which page a number came from and whether that page was checked.
Step-by-Step
Step 1: Define the Career and Match Scope
Decide what counts before you count anything. Do you want every official match, or only televised bouts? Only title matches? Only the independent years and skip dark matches and tryouts? Write the rule down in one sentence at the top of your document, because the rule will be tested later by someone who read your page.
Set the date range, list every ring name the wrestler used, and mark whether masked personas count as the same person. Exclude non-wrestling appearances by default: photo shoots, segments and stand-up appearances are not bouts and databases that include them will inflate your totals.
You know the scope worked when you can predict roughly how many matches the record should contain. If a twenty-year career is showing nine matches, the filter is wrong before the data is.
Step 2: Start with a Central Wrestler Record
Open the Cagematch profile and read the complete match list top to bottom rather than trusting the summary header. Note the wrestler’s unique database ID, then search the same name on WrestlingData and one of the others.
Watch for the classic fragmentation here. A wrestler who debuted under one name, masked up under a second, and returned under a third will have three separate profile pages, and adding their totals together without merging them is the single most common research error. Geneastar-style pages list a wrestler’s Cagematch, WrestlingData, Internet Wrestling Database and Slam! Sports IDs side by side, which is how experienced researchers jump between sources.
That step is finished when every profile page belonging to the same person is identified and recorded, and you have a list of gaps: years with no coverage, promotions missing entirely, and tag team stints listed under the team only.
Step 3: Build the Match List Chronologically
Use one row per match with these columns: date, promotion, event, opponent or team, match type, result, title or stakes, source, notes. Sort by date, not by promotion, so gaps appear in the right place on the timeline.
Decide in advance how you will handle the awkward outcomes. Tournaments and battle royals are normally logged as one entry per event with the finish noted, because databases disagree about whether an elimination counts as a loss. Title changes need the reign start and end recorded separately from the match result. Draws, time-limit draws and no-contests each get their own result value rather than being folded into wins and losses.
For tag team and multi-man bouts, credit the individual, not just the team. A wrestler with 400 matches under three different tag teams has a very different career from one with 400 singles matches, and most published records never bother to say which they mean.
Step 4: Verify Results Against Independent Sources
This is where the research actually happens. Cross-check event cards, official promotion listings, contemporary reports, archived pages, video and the second database. The consensus habit among researchers is escalation: if two databases disagree, go up to Dave Meltzer’s Wrestling Observer reporting or a dated archive of the original promotion coverage.
Dead pages are normal in this hobby. Slam! Sports URLs have gone offline in large numbers, and the Internet Archive Wayback Machine does not hold everything. When a page 404s, try the Wayback Machine, then archive.fo, then the promotion’s own archive page. Save the recovered copy with its original date rather than the date you found it, because the publication date is part of the evidence.
Apply a three-source rule to anything you plan to publish: the match must be confirmed in at least two independent databases plus one dated source. Single-source claims about a result get an uncertainty flag in the notes column, not a confident sentence.
Step 5: Resolve Duplicates, Missing Data, and Name Changes
Duplicates are the easy half. The same event is often logged once per promotion, once per night and once per team, so identical date-plus-opponent rows collapse into a single entry. Reused event names are the trap that follows: two cards called the same thing five years apart are different matches, so always key rows on date rather than event title.
Missing results are harder. A listed bout with no finish usually means a dark match, a tryout, or a match cut from the broadcast. If two sources still cannot tell you how it ended, record it as documented-participation-only and keep it out of your win-loss total.
Disputed finishes get a priority order: official promotion result, then dated contemporary reporting, then two independent databases in agreement, then one database alone. Name changes and masked identities get merged into one person record with an alias table, so the career reads as a career and the totals mean something.
Step 6: Audit and Present the Final History
Count what you have, then separate verified entries from uncertain ones in your summary. State the coverage boundary honestly: machine-harvested bulk data starts around 1 January 1985 for many promotions, which a scraper documented on r/njpw when they rebuilt Cagematch’s event and match data for NJPW. Anything before that, plus much territorial wrestling and a large share of Japanese promotions, has to come from print.
Calculate the overall record only where it means something, and put context beside the number. A 700-match independent record and a 200-match major promotion record are not comparable, yet most sites print them side by side with no explanation. Split your totals by promotion and by singles versus tag work, and say which opponent groups and stipulations are excluded.
Present the result as a table, a season-by-season timeline, or a research appendix with a source column. The appendix format is the most useful for other people because it lets them re-check your work. If you have a large enough dataset, a SQLite file or spreadsheet with a documented schema makes the whole record reusable, which is what data fans on Kaggle and the wrestling data community ask for.
Common Mistakes
Treating one database as complete is the big one. Every one of them has gaps, and the gaps differ, which is precisely why two sources beat one.
Confusing a card listing with a result is common too. A promoted match can be cut, replaced or never taped. Unless a source states the finish, you have a booking, not a result.
Mixing independent and televised volume without context produces records that flatter nobody. Break them apart before you compare.
Counting a team match once and forgetting that three wrestlers earned it distorts every record attached to that team. Credit the individual.
Using an unsourced Wikipedia line as your only citation is the fastest way to get a correction thread. Check the cited source, then check a second one.
Presenting a disputed outcome as certain is worse than leaving a gap. Mark it uncertain and move on.
Using an archived page without recording the original publication date leaves you unable to tell a contemporary report from a page edited years later. Write the date into the source column every single time.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best site for researching a wrestler’s full match history?
Cagematch is the best starting point because it has the deepest match-by-match coverage and the best filters for promotion, year and match type. Researchers on r/SquaredCircle treat it as the default and use WrestlingData as a cross-check. No single site is complete, so a real career record needs at least two databases plus a dated source for anything you intend to publish.
How do I count tournament and battle royal matches in a wrestler’s record?
Log them as one entry per event, with the individual finish noted in the same row, and keep them out of your singles win-loss total. Databases disagree about whether an early elimination counts as a loss, and that disagreement is why totals drift between sites. If you want a fair overall record, publish a match count and a clean singles record as two separate numbers.
Is Cagematch accurate and complete for every professional wrestler?
No. Its match results are generally clean, but dates are frequently wrong for multi-night events because bouts were taped out of broadcast order. Coverage is also uneven: much of the bulk data starts around 1 January 1985, and independent and Japanese promotions are thin in places. Treat it as the best single starting point rather than a finished record.
How do I research a wrestler who changed names or worked in different promotions?
Search every ring name separately on each database and merge the resulting profiles into one person record with an alias table. Cross-database ID listings, the kind Geneastar-style pages provide, are the fastest way to confirm that three profiles belong to the same wrestler. Only merge identities that a dated source supports, especially when a masked persona is involved.
What should I do when two wrestling sources list different results for the same match?
Escalate instead of picking one. Check the promotion’s own result, then dated contemporary reporting such as Dave Meltzer’s Wrestling Observer, then a second independent database. Apply a fixed priority order, record which source you used in a source column, and flag the entry as uncertain if nothing settles it. That way your uncertainty survives the next person who checks your work.
Conclusion
Open one Cagematch profile, write your scope rule in a sentence, and export the match-by-match list into a spreadsheet with a source column. Then run the same name through WrestlingData and mark every gap you find before you start filling it in.
The databases will disagree with each other, and some of what you are chasing will not exist in any of them. Saying which source each number came from, and which questions you could not settle, is what turns a pile of links into a record other people can trust.
