Christian Cage Out With Broken Ribs and a Collapsed Lung; Adam Copeland Says 2027 Will Be His Last Year

CHICAGO, by way of Wednesday night

Professional wrestling runs on toughness, but some injury reports stop you cold. Christian Cage is out of action with three broken ribs — one of them broken in three places — and a collapsed lung, injuries he suffered early in a ladder match at AEW All Out last month and then, somehow, wrestled through to the finish. The news was delivered by his longtime partner Adam Copeland on Wednesday's Dynamite, in a segment that doubled as something even bigger: Copeland announcing that 2027 will be the final year of his own career.

The details come from F4WOnline's Josh Nason, reported by Greenville Sports Media, and were corroborated in the live coverage of Pro Wrestling Dot Net and in reports from Cultaholic and WrestleView. According to Copeland's on-air account, relayed by those outlets, Cage was thrown into a ladder roughly five minutes into the three-way ladder match for the AEW World Tag Team Championships at All Out in Chicago — a Tables, Ladders and Chairs match, per Cultaholic, pitting Cage and Copeland against The Young Bucks and FTR. That collision is where the ribs and the lung went. Cage finished the match anyway, and was up on the ladders reaching for the championships at the end, a fact Copeland made sure the crowd understood before the chants for his partner started.

No timetable for a 52-year-old who has done everything

AEW announced no timetable for Cage's return, per F4WOnline's reporting via Greenville Sports Media. He is 52 years old, and the list of things left for him to prove is essentially empty. He arrived in AEW in early 2021 and has since held the World Tag Team Championship, the Trios Championship and the TNT Championship twice, per Greenville Sports Media and Cultaholic — a second prime stacked on top of the WWE and TNA primes that made him a star in the first place. A collapsed lung is not a work-through-it injury, even by wrestling's warped standards, and broken ribs punish every breath, let alone every bump. Whenever he comes back, it will be on his body's schedule, not the booking sheet's.

There is also no replacing what Cage was doing in this version of the act. The reunion of Cage and Copeland — best friends since school in Ontario, tag partners since the 1990s — was one of AEW's most reliable emotional engines: two men in their fifties wrestling like the last thirty years were a warm-up. Cultaholic's report noted that Copeland's announcement effectively puts the team on hold, and possibly closes it, while Cage recovers. The Young Bucks won that All Out match, per Cultaholic. What nobody knew that night in Chicago was that the price of it was still being counted.

Copeland sets his own finish line

Then came the second half of the segment, and it may be the part people talk about longer. After beating Josh Alexander in a Clockwork Carnage qualifying match, Copeland told the crowd that Cage's injury had forced him to think about his own clock, and that 2027 will be his last year in professional wrestling, according to WhatCulture, Cultaholic and WrestleView, which covered the special three-hour Dynamite and Collision broadcast on October 14. He was frank about the reasoning, in paraphrase: he is aging out of the business, he knows it, and he would rather name the ending himself. The crowd answered with chants urging him not to go.

He is not limping to the line, either. Copeland made clear he intends to chase the AEW World Championship on his way out, and he will be in the Clockwork Carnage match for Will Ospreay's title at WrestleDream this Saturday, October 17, in Orlando, per WrestleView and WhatCulture. WhatCulture's report underlined the scale of the career being wound down: Copeland debuted in 1992, became Edge in WWE, was forced to retire in 2011 with a serious neck condition, then returned at the 2020 Royal Rumble after nine years away and debuted in AEW on October 1, 2023. A man who already had one ending taken from him is now choosing the second one — that, more than anything, is what Wednesday night was about.

So AEW leaves the week with its most storied tag team split by circumstance: one man healing from injuries most people would need help standing up from, the other counting down a farewell year with a world title in his sights. Don Callis and his family interrupted the moment on Wednesday, because of course they did, per Pro Wrestling Dot Net's live report. But the headlines belong to Cage and Copeland. Get well soon, Captain Charisma. And Cope — make 2027 count.

What Saturday now looks like

The immediate business is WrestleDream, where Copeland steps into the eight-man Clockwork Carnage match for Ospreay's AEW World Championship on Saturday in Orlando, per WhatCulture and WrestleView — a match he reached by beating Alexander on Wednesday before picking up the microphone. A farewell year means something different when it starts with a world title shot rather than a nostalgia lap, and Copeland has spent his entire AEW run rejecting the nostalgia framing: this is a man who main-evented across four decades and plainly intends the fifth year of this run to be about the top prize, not the tributes. The tributes, Wednesday made clear, will take care of themselves. For Cage, there is no match to point at, only a recovery with no public timeline — and a tag division that will feel noticeably thinner every week the two of them are not in it together.

More wrestling and sports coverage is in the Previously sports section, and see also our story on Cody Rhodes signing his five-year WWE extension.