A look at... Franz Schuhmann

   

Franz Schuhmann vs Dean Malenko, Bremen 11/12/1994

Great match. Dean Malenko sure has fallen out of favour but I have no problem calling this a great performance. This match was less about friendly sunset flip rollup sequences, it was more about Dean Malenko the great technician coming in and putting the local babyface under pressure by kicking the shit out of his leg. The crowd was absolutely boiling hot for this, totally backing Franz all the way although some chants for Dean broke out later. They absolutely were having a blast. In a way the crazy crowd heat and european rounds system alone helps a lot, there’s nothing quite like Franz Schuhmanns title defenses. Here Schuhmann was really milking everything for maximum drama, and Dean busts out a lot of cool stuff. Dean hits a really fast snappy dropkick to Franz neck, a really cool tiger spin into a low dropkick, then they do this extended sequence with Dean working a reverse surfboard to try and force a pin that I’ve never seen quite like that before. It helps that Schuhmann actually sells that he’s taking damage to the leg and favouring it, making Deans subsequent methods to get his leg even better, including a really sweet rolling takedown. Franz is very content taking his time here but when he does bust out a comeback he pulls of some pretty epic shit. He has this great surfboard stretch just as the bell for the end of the round rings, an awesome pop up dropkick where he just launched himself straight to the ceiling, a really sweet frankensteiner off the top rope into a straight pin. It also helps that things like a dive to the outside or German Suplex feel a lot harder and unexpected in this kind of European style match. My favourite spot may have been the flying crucifix pin that Dean tries to struggle hard against, it was straight out of an epic lucha title match. The final pin that Franz scores is totally awesome in the way that it’s set up and executed. The match is a bit slow here but can you blame them taking it slow when the crowd is this hot? And that fucking ending?! They had them celebrating this finish like Germany just won the football world cup, and Franz isn’t even a German. The start and stop rhythm of the rounds works very well for Deans somewhat disjointed approach to wrestling and there are some fun moments where he gets frustrated and heels it up a little. Most importantly the feel of a big time title fight is here with both guys pulling out some great stuff. Well worth powering through the video quality to watch this, don’t worry the guy starts zooming in about a minute into the bout and it gets more watchable, jesus can you imagine watching this on a VHS?! Great bout anyways, nothing quite like it.

Terry Funk vs Franz Schuhmann, 11/29/1996

Terry Funk in a European ring! It feels so odd but you know, he’s the GOAT so he can just show up wherever and do his thing. Knowing Terry was a really great technician in his prime made me wonder what him in a proper technical rounds match would look like but this is chaotic brawling Terry. It very much feels like Terrys doing his own version of his younger self vs Abby and Sheik here. 1^st round is all Terry trying to force the match to the outside and Franz thwarting it by rolling back in. They proceed to not waste much time as Franz starts going for punches early, with Terry doing some fun stooging and bouncing around in the ropes, Terry Funk style, before he takes a tumble over the announce table right into Otto Wanzs lap. There’s some fun logical wrestling as Terry is able to reverse an attempted suplex into a neckbreaker and then he drops Franz with an absolutely harrowing Ganso bomb on that completely unforgiving European style ring. Franz is able to reverse the next one into a rana and he does the right thing and instead of going for a pin he goes to pound on Terry with some more punches. Terry eventually gets ahold of his branding iron and is able to hit Schuhmann in the leg to take over. There’s even a bit where Tony St Clair who is seconding Franz tries to have a go at Terry with Terry hitting Schuhmann in the head with the branding iron again while the referee is distracted. Franz starts bleeding and Terry slaps him around and punches and this is pretty great. Schuhmann gets one brief comeback but soon looks like he is bleeding out, and Terry punches the referee for the DQ. Fun chaos and after match Funk takes another chair to Schuhmann (with St. Clair hilariously standing right next to it and doing nothing to stop it) and gets on the mic saying the word PISS a lot. Schuhmann wasn’t exactly a Memphis level puncher here but he knew what to do, and nobody could do it quite like the Funker.

Franz Schuhmann vs Fit Finlay, Reslo ??

Totally sick match which really feels like one of the greatest TV match ever. It’s just a total fight with both guys hitting each other in unhinged ways. Finlay was just trying to knock Schuhmann head off with insanely hard clotheslines, kicking him in the ribs and stomping on his fingers constantly. His signature apron spots also looked especially brutal here. Schuhmann was giving back as hard as he got, hitting some really hard clotheslines and uppercuts of his own. These two also must have fought each other like 500 times so all their stuff looks super good and seamless. They were just working some snug holds and back and forth, with Schuhmann busting out some fun wrestling. At points both guys would deconstruct the Reslo barricades to beat on each other with those planks. There’s something said about a wrestling match so wild they end up taking the arena apart. Loved Schuhmanns reckless dive over the top rope too. Great stuff, one of the hardest Finlay matches of the 90s.

 

Franz Schuhmann vs. Doc Dean, Hannover 9/27/1997 

Yes, Doc Dean, the British guy who was in WCW for a minute! This is probably his longest match on tape and it's a fun look at a worker that most people would remember as a jobber. At this more different influences were coming to a boil in the territory. You still have the rounds KO 10 counts, but also get some big bombs like Schuhmann busting out a really hard suicide dive, Dean spiking him with a totally nasty death valley driver etc. Dean is nice and aggressive early and goes for some more 'modern' submissions like straight armbars and rear naked chokes. The commentator talks about how Dean beat Jushin Liger in England and that sounds pretty fun. Loved how Dean would really fight for his life when Franz would try to lock in a surfboard hold or sharpshooter. Franz is still spry and his big suicide dive looked amazing. Then he honest to god tried to submit Dean with an ultra-tight headscissor that the crowd was hot for. Schuhmann ends up bleeding and we get Dean punching and biting the cut. The finish felt a bit random but I always like bomb dropping more in a rounds match with KO 10 counts, and they dropped some good bombs. 

2026 Matchguide #2

Yuki Ishikawa & Fuminori Abe & Shuji Ishikawa vs. Daisuke Ikeda & Ali Najima & Kazunari Murakami, Kakuto Tanteidan 7/1

Impossible not to love this match. Chaotic and frenzied with everyone potatoeing each other a ton, which is probably the best possible approach they could have taken. While there wasn't much refined shootstyle going on I really liked that Abe armlock early on that nearly dislocated Najimas shoulder. Najima was pretty much a whipping boy here, eating punishment from all 3 opponents early on. Shuji Ishikawas a pretty effective crowbar as almost everything he does looks downright murderous.  It's also pretty cool that we got a little Yuki Ishikawa/Najima section. Ishikawa crowned him with a pretty sick headbutt too. I was also pleased that there was no stupid Abe comedy, instead he and Najima developed a really amusing hatred for each other throughout this with Najima going at him aggressively constantly. Really hope they can face each other at Sportiva sometime soon or something. Floor brawling section wasn't amazing but we got to see chairs being used and Abe knuckle punching Najima in the crowd. Ishikawa/Murakami exchange was fun and nostalgic with Murakamis mugging and Ishikawa still being willing to take some punishment. Match went to the next level with the Ikeda shoot headbutt section. Shuji Ishikawa seemingly trying to drill through Ishikawas face with his head may have been the moment of the match. I did not think they would be able to keep up that level of violence, but the Abe/Murakami section surprisingly delivered thanks to Abes punches causing hardway blood and the violence of Murakamis face kicks and punches. There was also an attempted eyerake that looked like Murakami was really about to rip Abes eye out, so just the right kind of grizzly violent little thing. Abe also may have had the most violent save of the match with his flying face stomp. Great match, delivering plenty of sick violence without overstaying its welcome, and a bunch of these guys pretty much had their best performance in forever here.

Kosuke Sato/Ryuma Sekimo vs. Ali Najima/Hinata Kasai, Fuminori Abe & Takuya Nomura Produce 7/1 

 
Pretty great hard hitting  high adrenaline opening  match like a Fu-Ten or WAR match. Basically they tried to put some scrappy violence into every exchange, along with a few unexpected moments and succeeded. I've not seen Sekimo and Kasai before, but they knew what they had to deliver here. Sekimo seemed a little goofy but he was throwing really violent hands and working a camel clutch like he really wanted to torture the guy. Also liked how he just rammed into Najima with his head. I also really enjoyed Kasais throat jumping outburst towards the end. I like how guys were really trying to crank necks with their headlocks so the way Kosuke Sato snatched a surprise front headlock was pretty great. Nomura was quite the bruiser here also and Kosukes dropkick on the armbar was another great moment. Other highlights include some brain-scrambling headbutts and a straight face punch as well as Najimas face stomping. 

 

 Hideki Suzuki vs. Go Shiozaki, AJPW 5/17

 
I haven't cared about Shiozaki since he adopted the embarassing Fake Okada look, but his banged up performance was pretty good here. The gritty out of nowhere lariat was great. What followed was the usual tour around the ring, made a little better by Suzuki resisting some of Shiozakis attacks. After some mediocre minutes the match got back on track when Suzuki would use the guardrails to hurt Shiozakis taped up ribs. What followed was some nice violent work in which Suzuki took some pages out of the playbooks of Terry Rudge and Johnny Smith. I was even somewhat okay with Shiozakis no-selling comebacks as he looked like such a zombie, and him coming up with a bloody nose and actually starting to put some spirit into his Baba chops was a cool moment. The finishing stretch wasn't super interesting aside from Suzukis comical pedigree, but I did like how Suzuki went back to smashing the fuck out of Shiozakis rib section. I'm a bit lukewarm on this overall as it suffered from typical modern day Japanese big match problems but there was some fun violence here.

 

HII vs. The Wolf, fight of the ring 1/18/2026

The Wolf's return to pro wrestling is something I have glossed over a bit and I probably need to cover it more. I mostly remember him as a reckless kicker from his WYF days, but he was quite good doing maestros style technical work here, busting out a cool peterson roll amongst other things, and generally looking pretty adept. HII has also become a pretty interesting worker at this point. This didn't really shift into next gear with its intensity, but it was two old technicians doing some fun pro wrestling and that's always right up my ally. 

Chon Shiryu vs. Rina Yamashita, Choco Pro 2/25

 I'm a shameless sucker for Chon Shiryu, the representative of the 2 coolest martial arts in the world, pro wrestling and kung fu. Yamashita is not super interesting but she is big enough that she can credibly fight against Shiryu, and she has some good power offense including a nice harai goshi. That said the bulk of the match was carried by Shiryus crazy kung fu antics and unique spots. Early minutes had some good hard fought hold for hold wrestling, including Shiryu making sure to put extra torque into a basic wristlock like Pai Mei torturing Uma Thurman in Kill Bill. Shiryu is able to make even a fairly rote strike exchange look interesting with his kung fu poses, he also makes even his basic kung fu strikes look pretty hard hitting. Most of the early parts of the match is the Shiryu show with him busting out crazy transitions and set ups for odd 619s, including a few things I've never seen him do before, he's always coming up with new tricks. He does take a pretty reckless looking bump when Yamashita catches him on an attempted springboard, and later he hits his springboard rider kick to the floor which is a crazy spot from a 47 year old guy. Finishing run had both of them selling damage to their legs when they got their knees up on flying moves and some crazy rollups, which was a lot more interesting than the usual bombfest, and Yamashita coming alive a bit. 

  

2026 Matchguide 

More from Cosmo Soldiers YouTube channel

     Cosmo Soldier & Tadahiro Fujisaki vs. Takeshi Sato & Yuji Kito, WYF 1998/3/15

Wrestle Yume Factory is one of my favourite promotions ever. WYF undercard matches like this are like pro wrestling in a lawless wasteland. There is a hearty dose of BattlARTS/WARish violence, general anarchy and an infusion of raw spirit that you don’t find like this often. It’s chaotic and glorious. This goes 15 minutes so they have some time. The first half of this was a lot of tight headlocks and groundwork, guys trying to ground each other but explosions did happen. Takeshi Sato who is IWA Japan scum is the first to really start the shenanigans as he lays with kicks hard as a brick into people. He goes for something like a dropkick or a high knee that lands awkwardly and his first instinct is to kick the other guy really hard again. Pro wrestling is a struggle against yourself as much as your opponent. Cosmo Soldier is likely here to just kick someone in the ear to get out of a hold, or dropkick them flush in the face. His dropkicks looked amazing and he is spirited trying to grapple it out with a kickpadded adversary. There’s hardly any rope running here and it makes the whole thing resemble a more serious wrestling match in the vein of BattlARTS. What these guys lack in polish they make up tenfold for by sheer willingness to bring the fight. Takeshi Sato continued to be a fiend here, randomly hitting one of the hardest enzuigiris I’ve ever seen to Fujisakis skull. Later Cosmos leg randomly gives out on him (element of chaos) and Sato would swiftly punish him by just landing this immensely beautiful and cruel high kick to his head. Fujisaki was pretty surely and great here too, working really solid early on, cinching headlocks, grabbing half crabs and leaning back hard, later uncorking his trademark hard headbutts, uncontained open hand strikes and lariating Sato straight in the face for all his sins. His turnbuckle headbutt spot looks so brutal, literally every member in the front row had their mouths open from amazement with how he drove into his skull into another persons face. Cosmo also had one of his finer days besides his leg giving out. I loved how he just absolutely spiked Sato with a uranage. Sato, of course, rolled out the ring to clutch his aching neck, and Soldier immediately followed up with a big dive. Nice and spontaneous, everyone here was living in the moment. Kito was sticking to fairly basic stuff at this point and he’s solid, his big spot was a double knee drop off the top that looked pretty hurty, and took a back-hitting headbutt from Fujisaki and got spiked on his neck by his big suplexes like a champ. Second half of this match is just a frenzy with guys trying to knock the soul out of each other, everything having maximum force and violence. Random spin kick from Takeshi Sato? Yeah, looked like it made the other guy reconsider his life choices immediately after taking it. Soldier going for his big cancun tornado? Yeah, this might as well kill the guy. At one point Fujisaki, when breaking up a submission made sure to really dig his foot into the other guys face before stomping like he was trying to crack a particularily tough walnut. Nothing held back, just for this small gym audience and a lone camera filming this to end up in storage and somehow on YouTube 28 years later. Comparing a match like this to something like Flair/Steamboat would be like comparing Cannibal Corpses A Skull Full of Maggots to the Moonlight Sonata. But sometimes I wanna listen to Cannibal Corpse. I love my Wrestle Yume Factory and this delivered hard.

Kishimen vs. Kuraudo Kondo, KAGEKI 2009/2/15

Who is this mysterious Kishimen? Perhaps Cosmo Soldiers cousin from another dimension. Online sources tell me Kuraudo Kondo is a student of Masashi Aoyagi. That might mean that he took a karate class of Aoyagi once when he was a teenager, or it might be the truth. Kondo looks like a UWF fighter, and he actually fights like a student of Aoyagi, e.g. he kicks a lot and he kicks really really hard. This is also in a kickboxing ring so you know any fall in that ring hurts like hell. Kishimen takes him down to hit a really hard elbow to his face. A not-clean break later Kishimen waffles Kondo some more with open hand hits and then absolutely spikes him with a shootstyle-DDT on his head in that unforgiving kickboxing ring. This causes Kondo to have enough of Kishimen and just starts kicking the absolute shit out of him, absolutely not holding back on any of his kicks, and slamming him right in the middle of that unforgiving ring. Kishimen takes back over with a damn abdominal stretch and it’s all awkward violence from here on. Kondo continues to hold absolutely nothing back on his kicks and I’d like to see more of his short career. Kishimen flies ass-first into Kondos face twice in this match, at first it seemed like an accident, but the second time you fully understand this man was trying to break his opponents face with his ass. Kishimen ends up cranking the nastiest chickenwing crossface I’ve ever seen for the tap. If the previous match was A Skull Full of Maggots then this is like Last Days of Humanity or Rompeprop, or your little brothers band sloppily covering Carcass or Autopsy where the singer loses his voice halfway into the song and just starts screeching… eitherways, still pretty enjoyable violent chaos.

Cosmo Soldier & Raging Bull vs. Tadahiro Fujisaki & Shigeo Kato, WYF 1/23/1998

The WYF streak continues. This starts with all these guys working holds and hitting the mat, and it has the vibe of something like a MUGA match but with that rugged WYF charm. Looking at this match is like looking at a wrestling fractal, you see deeper and deeper flourishes and details even in usually mundane things as all these guys have a unique way of doing things, and sometimes will bust out things that no one else would think of doing such as the slick entry into a stepover armbar Cosmo does here to get out of a sleeper hold. There’s some genuinely slick stuff going on between Fujisaki and Cosmo, but a big part of the fascination is that these guys might just pop each other in the mouth in totally uncalled for ways or suddenly kick someone in the face to get out of a hold. Really exploring how you can break submissions in painful ways, either by driving our own foot in someones face or having your partner come in and dropkick them right in the skull. Kato is all about ratty old school ways to hurt opponents, and doing things like randomly squeezing a cravate really hard. Raging Bull is this odd guy from Texas who somehow ended up getting trained at the WYF dojo, he’s unspectacular in the sense that he will tag in and just hit some elbow drops, but he’s kind of likable as he realizes he needs to make this stuff look urgent, so he doesn’t dull things. As always with these matches the first half is ground-based and solid peppered with guys potatoeing each other in uncalled and unpredictable ways. There are some hard Fujisaki headbutts, but things really start kicking when Cosmo breaks out of a hold by kicking Kato in the head, following with a sick enzuigiri also to the head and then absolutely spiking him with sick uranage before stubbornly trying to snap his arm. Things really get cooking in the last 7 minutes or so with all kinds of awesome scrappy action and details. You get chaotic and wild, such as Cosmo eating some reckless face stomps from Fujisaki only to grab onto his wrist and slingshot him across the ring, really making the absolute most of ‘I need to get this guy to my corner’ in an unconventional way. There are more violent submission breaks, Kato wincing in pain after taking a basic double axe handle to his bad shoulder and deciding to absolutely spike Cosmo with some mean piledrivers. The finishing run ends up being Cosmo vs. Fujisaki and it’s pretty much 3 minutes of gold. Loved how Fujisaki would stop a charging Soldier by just grabbing on to his face then headbutting him right between the eyes, then almost knock his head off with one of the hardest lariats I’ve ever seen. There’s also this amazing moment where Cosmo tried to reverse into a Fujiwara armbar, Fujisaki would stomp on his ankle really hard and Kato came in at the same time just obliterating him with superkick to the face, then Fujisaki would dump him with these awesome Otsuka-esque deadlift suplexes. Just a multitude of awesome things happening at once, and it made for a really exciting finishing run built on the solid build up of this match. Also gotta love Cosmo for being able to pull off something genuinely impressive like a big leaping rana or cool jumping kick despite all his flaws. He ended up pulling off something chaotic for the finish too and that rules. Another chapter in the book called Why Wrestle Yume Factory Was Awesome And I might Name My Three Children Cosmo Soldier, Tadahiro Fujisaki and Raging Bull

Cosmo Soldier vs. Koji Niizumi, KAGEKI 7/22/2017

I am always interested in Koji Niizumi. From what I’ve seen, he’s just this crazy hard hitter who makes people cry for their momma. To my surprise though, Cosmo Soldier was the unhinged one here. He was laying into Niizumi full force constantly, smacking him in the face, bending his legs at nasty angles with cool and unusual submissions and landing some of the hardest stomps you’ll ever see. Cosmo Soldier was so hellbent on trying every evil idea he could come up with here it made me long to see Niizumi tee off a bit more, so when he does it’s really satisfying. When it was time to give the beating back Niizumi was hitting Soldier with elbows and lariats that looked like they would take years off someones life. It built to some fine fine moments of really violent and fun pro wrestling. It seems Cosmo had overreached at the end and gassed himself out leaving him open for Niizumi to kill him off with an elbow that looked harder than the one Misawa knocked out Hansen with. A well earned victory in this title match that deserved that name. I really wish I could see more of Niizumi but until then these rare appearances of him are gems.