10 best retired wrestlers you have never heard of

#7 Nobuhiko Takada

Takada also liked to dress up like a general during his HUSTLE years

Nobuhiko Takada was one of the most innovative and influential wrestlers of both the 1980s and the 1990s. Not only did his wrestling style – which was centred on stiff submission holds and even stiffer strikes – play a big role in the explosion of MMA in Japan, but he was also a creative genius that influenced the ‘invasion’ storyline.

Takada was big on shoot-style wrestling, and his matches and accomplishments helped elevate that ‘realistic style’ that eventually led to MMA becoming such a big phenomenon. Though his own personal MMA record was mixed at best, Takada made it incredibly popular.

But more importantly, Takada was the founder of the Union of Wrestling Forces International (UWFi), a shoot-style promotion that ‘invaded’ NJPW during the mid-1990s. Takada and NJPW enjoyed a fantastic relationship, and both promotions made tonnes of money on the major storyline of UWFi ‘outsiders’ invading NJPW in the hopes of taking it over and eventually destroying it, though they were unsuccessful in that storyline.

If all of this sounds familiar to you, that’s because this was the exact story idea that Eric Bischoff used as the basis of the Outsiders (which later became the New World Order) in WCW, and to a lesser extent, the Invasion storyline in WWE in 2001.