Chelsea Green was hanging upside down.
At SummerSlam, her feet were tangled around the bottom of the ladder.
So she improvised.
Green hauled herself upright, started climbing and eventually reached the championship that had spent much of her career feeling several rungs above wherever wrestling had decided to place her.
It was ridiculous. It was also perfect.
On August 2, 2026, Chelsea Green defeated Tiffany Stratton, Jade Cargill, Charlotte Flair and Lash Legend in the five-woman ladder match created following Rhea Ripley’s injury. It gave Green her first WWE world championship and completed a curious progression through WWE: comedy character, tag champion, inaugural Women’s United States Champion, two-time holder of that title and, finally, Interim WWE Women’s Champion.
The temptation now is to treat this as the moment Chelsea Green finally became important.
I think that gets her career backwards.
Green has spent years making herself important in matches where she wasn’t necessarily supposed to be.
That is the thread running through her career. She has wrestled champions, prospects and legends across NWA, IMPACT, Ring of Honor, AAA, NXT and WWE. Sometimes she has been the star. Sometimes she has been there to make somebody else look like one. Sometimes she has won. Quite often she has been smashed into something.
So rather than beginning her story at SummerSlam, it seems more appropriate to climb back down the ladder.
These are nine matches that explain how she got up there.
9. Chelsea Green vs. Janai Kai, ROH, 2021
There is something fascinating about watching Chelsea Green wrestle Janai Kai now.
Kai would eventually develop into one of the more distinctive strikers on the American independent scene. Here, though, she was the dangerous newcomer standing opposite somebody considerably more television-ready.
Green had another problem.
Her wrist.
In 2021, injuries had become an unwanted recurring character in her career. She had suffered a broken wrist during her WWE run and another arm injury had prevented her from competing in ROH’s inaugural Women’s World Championship tournament.
Against Kai, therefore, Green wrestled like somebody who understood exactly what the assignment required.
Don’t attempt to out-kick the Kick Demon.
Remove the kicks.
She slowed Kai down, attacked her limbs and repeatedly disrupted the distance Kai needed to generate her striking offence. Kai eventually found enough space to start throwing the spinning kicks that made her dangerous, but Green survived the acceleration, avoided the decisive strike and hit I’m Prettier.
It isn’t the spectacular Chelsea Green match.
It might be one of the more useful ones.
Because underneath the character work, screaming and increasingly elaborate catastrophes is a wrestler who understands how matches function.
That becomes important later.
8. Ashley Vox vs. Chelsea Green, ROH, 2021
Ashley Vox approached the problem differently.
Rather than allowing Green to dictate the pace, Vox went after the recently healed arm.
Wrist-locks. Arm drags. Movement.
Suddenly Green wasn’t merely the veteran controlling a newcomer. She was the wrestler being forced to solve a problem.
That is what makes these ROH matches interesting when viewed from 2026.
There was no Secret Hervice. No championship celebration. No increasingly furious WWE authority figure waiting backstage to receive a complaint.
Just wrestling.
Vox accelerated late and nearly stole the match with a barrage of forearms. Green escaped the decisive attack, found the positional mistake she needed and the finisher.
Another win.
Another match built around Green adapting rather than overwhelming somebody.
The Allüre confronted her afterwards, continuing her ROH programme, but the company itself was approaching an enormous transition.
Green was too.
The version of Chelsea Green that would eventually conquer WWE wasn’t quite here yet.
But several of the components were.
7. Chelsea Green & Ethan Page vs. La Hiedra & Mr. Iguana, AAA, 2025
Four years later, subtlety had left the building.
It was wrestling globalization distilled into one wonderfully strange photograph.
Chelsea Green. Ethan Page. AAA championships.
Why not?
La Hiedra and Mr. Iguana had held the belts for 330 days. Green and Page ended the reign on November 2, 2025, and the defeat fractured the champions, with La Hiedra turning on Iguana afterwards.
There are technically better Chelsea Green matches.
This one belongs here because it demonstrates something else about her career.
Green travels.
Before WWE finally understood exactly what it possessed, she had already developed the adaptability required to appear in wildly different wrestling environments without becoming anonymous inside them.
IMPACT Chelsea worked.
ROH Chelsea worked.
NWA Chelsea worked.
AAA Chelsea worked.
Eventually WWE stopped trying to sand those edges away.
That changed everything.
6. Chelsea Green & Piper Niven vs. Sol Ruca & Zaria, NXT, 2025
VXT weren’t merely two established wrestlers temporarily carrying belts. They had beaten the company’s leading singles champion using the thing their opponents lacked.
Sometimes the most Chelsea Green thing imaginable happens without anyone planning it.
Green had already informed the younger pair that they were destined for failure.
Then the wrestling gods became involved.
During the match, Green legitimately broke her nose.
There was blood everywhere.
And she kept going.
The finish was spectacularly cruel. Zaria hoisted Niven onto her shoulders and delivered an F5 directly onto Green. Ruca immediately followed with the Sol Snatcher and pinned the United States Champion.
For Ruca, it was a breakthrough.
For Green, it became another example of the strange contradiction defining her WWE character.
She presents herself as somebody who should consider minor inconvenience an international human-rights violation.
Yet Chelsea Green is remarkably difficult to stop.
The broken nose became material. The defeat became another story. Ruca received a championship opportunity.
Green somehow emerged even more Green than before.
That contradiction is essential.
The coward is strangely fearless.
5. Chelsea Green vs. Giulia, NXT, 2024
Giulia needed somebody.
Not merely an opponent.
She needed somebody WWE viewers immediately understood.
The result was never really the question.
Giulia won in 6:54.
Decisively.
That was the point.
Green could complain, scramble, attack and react in ways that gave Giulia’s offence texture. When Giulia hit hard, Green made it look harder. When Giulia accelerated, Green provided the panic required to make the acceleration feel dangerous.
It would be easy to dismiss that as enhancement work.
It shouldn’t be.
Professional wrestling depends upon wrestlers capable of losing without shrinking.
Green has always possessed that ability.
You remember the person who beat her.
You also tend to remember Chelsea.
That is considerably rarer.
4. VXT vs. Jordynne Grace & Mia Yim, IMPACT, 2022
Before Piper Niven, Alba Fyre or the Secret Hervice, there was Deonna Purrazzo.
Green and Purrazzo had only recently captured the IMPACT Knockouts World Tag Team Championships when they encountered Jordynne Grace and Mia Yim in Cicero.
The champions wrestled like a team.
That sounds obvious.
It wasn’t.
Grace and Yim were individually dangerous, but VXT understood positioning, isolation and interruption. They separated Yim until she eventually escaped and brought Grace into the match, where the Knockouts World Champion promptly began throwing people around.
Green provided the disruption.
Purrazzo provided the finish.
Their Doom Collector put Grace down and Purrazzo pinned the reigning world champion.
That mattered.
Cohesion.
The result helped push Purrazzo towards another singles opportunity, but it also previewed something WWE would later exploit brilliantly with Green.
Give her allies and suddenly her personality multiplies.
Chelsea Green does not need an entourage.
But she certainly knows what to do with one.
3. Chelsea Green vs. Kamille vs. Kylie Rae, NWA, 2022
Chelsea Green wasn’t originally supposed to be here.
Again, perfect.
At the Crockett Cup in Nashville, Kylie Rae was scheduled to challenge Kamille for the NWA World Women’s Championship.
Then Matt Cardona became involved.
Yes, Matt Cardona is Zack Ryder. WWE fans knew him by that name for years, but he has wrestled under his real name since leaving WWE in 2020. Green began dating Cardona in 2017 and the couple married in Las Vegas on December 31, 2021.
In NWA, Cardona was world champion and using every scrap of political leverage his character could manufacture.
Chelsea entered the match.
Kamille was unimpressed, accusing Green of effectively receiving opportunities through favouritism.
There is the Chelsea Green character in embryonic form.
Entitlement.
Connections.
Outrage.
Opportunity.
Then the bell rings and she can actually wrestle.
Green flew from the top rope with a missile dropkick onto both opponents and repeatedly hunted opportunistic pinfalls. Kylie Rae provided the technical urgency. Kamille remained the immovable centre of everything.
Eventually the referee went down after being struck by Kamille’s leg. Rae believed she had won during the resulting confusion.
She hadn’t.
While Rae argued, Kamille recovered.
Spear.
Three.
Green didn’t win the championship.
She didn’t need to.
Later that evening she reappeared in Cardona’s main event and low-blowed special referee Jeff Jarrett to help her husband retain the NWA Worlds Heavyweight Championship.
A wrestler who can move between credible title challenger and shameless supporting villain in the same evening is extremely useful.
WWE would eventually build an entire character around that elasticity.
2. Chelsea Green vs. Mickie James, IMPACT, 2022
This might be the most important Chelsea Green match before her WWE return.
Not because she won.
Because she didn’t.
Green wanted to be the person responsible.
That distinction transformed the match.
This wasn’t somebody attempting to defeat Mickie James.
Chelsea wanted to end Mickie James.
Deonna Purrazzo interfered. Green attacked relentlessly. A Half Boston Crab threatened James’ survival. The referee went down. Purrazzo became involved again before Taylor Wilde arrived to remove her.
Then Green hit the Unprettier.
James kicked out.
For a moment, Green’s entire expression changed.
This was supposed to be it.
Instead, James survived and eventually countered Green’s missile dropkick into the pin that kept her career alive.
Chelsea had failed.
Backstage, she cried.
She told Purrazzo she was going home.
On one level, it was simply an effective way to remove Green from IMPACT television as her contract expired.
Inside the story, however, it felt considerably more personal.
The woman who had become obsessed with ending somebody else’s career disappeared because she couldn’t.
Weeks later, WWE’s Royal Rumble countdown reached zero.
Chelsea Green returned.
Five seconds later, Rhea Ripley threw her out.
Of course she did.
1. Bianca Belair vs. Chelsea Green vs. Michin, SmackDown, 2024
To understand why Chelsea Green winning a world championship in 2026 works, go back to June 21, 2024.
Bianca Belair hit Michin with the K.O.D.
The match was over.
Except Chelsea Green was still there.
She threw Belair out of the ring.
Then she covered Michin herself.
One.
Two.
Three.
Chelsea Green had qualified for Money in the Bank. WWE’s own preview subsequently confirmed that the victory over Belair and Michin sent her into her first Women’s Money in the Bank Ladder Match.
It is difficult to design a more appropriate Chelsea Green victory.
She didn’t overpower Bianca Belair.
She didn’t suddenly become the superior athlete.
She waited.
Then she stole the thing somebody else had already earned.
Two weeks later in Toronto, the joke became something considerably more interesting.
Green entered her first Money in the Bank ladder match alongside Iyo Sky, Naomi, Zoey Stark, Lyra Valkyria and Tiffany Stratton.
And people wanted Chelsea to win.
Not ironically.
Actually win.
She survived the ladders, landed an Unprettier onto one and eventually found herself climbing towards the briefcase with the arena roaring.
For a few seconds, it looked possible.
Then Stratton pushed the ladder.
Green flew over the top rope and disappeared through two tables at ringside.
Tiffany Stratton retrieved the briefcase.
It became one of the defining images of Green’s WWE career.
That is the strange thing about Chelsea.
Even her failures accumulate value.
The Ladder Was Always There
Two years separated those ladder matches.
Toronto and Minneapolis.
In the first, Chelsea Green climbed towards something everyone assumed she wouldn’t win.
In the second, she climbed towards something wrestling had spent more than a decade suggesting she probably never would.
Her career had taken her through Canada, Japan, Mexico and the American independent circuit; through IMPACT, Lucha Underground, NWA, Ring of Honor and multiple WWE runs. She had been Laurel Van Ness, Reklusa, a Hot Mess, a tag wrestler, a comedy character, an antagonist, an enhancement opponent, a champion and occasionally a human projectile.
WWE’s current biography now lists her achievements plainly: Women’s Tag Team Champion, twice Women’s United States Champion and Interim WWE Women’s Champion.
That list doesn’t quite explain Chelsea Green.
The matches do.
She has never required wrestling to present her as the strongest woman in the room. Or the fastest. Or the most technically gifted.
Her gift is different.
Green understands that wrestling isn’t only about winning the scene.
Sometimes it is about making sure the scene cannot exist without you.
That is why getting thrown through two tables at Money in the Bank ultimately helped rather than hurt her. Why being demolished by Giulia worked. Why breaking her nose against Sol Ruca became part of the performance. Why crying after failing to retire Mickie James made sense. Why stealing Bianca Belair’s pin felt completely authentic.
And why, when WWE finally decided to put a world championship above Chelsea Green’s head, there really was only one appropriate way for her to get it.
At SummerSlam, Jade Cargill hit her with Jaded onto a ladder. Tiffany Stratton nearly reached the championship before Green tipped her ladder over. Michin and B-Fab appeared to stop Chelsea when victory seemed inevitable. Charlotte Flair and Cargill fought above her.
Everybody else eventually fell.
Chelsea was still there.
Not elegantly.
Not heroically.
She was literally hanging upside down from the ladder.
Then she pulled herself back up.
For once, Chelsea Green wasn’t there to make somebody else’s moment memorable.
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