AEW and WWE Stars Who Had the Worst Summer of 2021

New champions, big career advancements and major victories from the All Elite Wrestling and WWE rosters were celebrated in Tuesday's breakdown of the stars who had the best summer of 2021.

However, it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows for everybody. Pro wrestling is a business where in order for someone to win, someone else has to lose.

Plenty of names in both companies had debilitating losses, dropped their championships, saw their careers spiral downward and suffered other setbacks.

Let's take a look at the Superstars of WWE and AEW who had, arguably, the worst summer of 2021.

AJ Styles has had a much rougher few months alongside Omos than it appears at first glance. While they were Raw tag team champions, The Phenomenal One suffered 10 losses out of his 13 matches. One of those saw them drop the titles to RK-Bro at SummerSlam.

Humberto Carrillo hasn't had much luck on the main roster in his career and saw his chance to turn things around this summer squashed with extreme intensity. He was beaten up by Sheamus on multiple occasions and made to look like a total chump before going back to losing on Main Event.

Where has Slapjack been since Retribution split? Nowhere to be found, save for wrestling two dark matches on SmackDown that he lost.

Cash Wheeler's arm injury from Fight for the Fallen was awful and halted FTR's momentum considerably. He's yet to step back in the ring.

Shinsuke Nakamura made the "best summer" list largely because of all the things he accomplished in spite of Baron Corbin, who has had as rough a time as anyone over the past few months.

He hadn't been doing much for some time, but everything started going on a substantial downward spiral once he started his feud with The King of Strong Style.

After a series of losses and having his King of the Ring crown stolen, Corbin was forced to put it up for grabs in a Battle for the Crown match, which he lost. Since then, Nakamura has been dubbed the new king and is sporting that expensive headpiece.

Corbin's life got progressively worse. He was eventually wearing the same stained, dirty clothing for weeks, went broke, his wife and kids left him, his car got repossessed, failed to qualify for the Money in the Bank ladder match, lost every match from June 11 onward and was a laughing stock.

Since then, Corbin's life has turned around. After hitting it big in Las Vegas, he's now rich again and feeling so good that he wants people to call him Happy Corbin.

It's a positive end to a horrendous summer for a guy who so down on his luck but still managed to gain no sympathy for it.

The Dark Order have no problem winning matches on AEW Dark and AEW Dark: Elevation. If any combination of the faction is up against rookies and developmental talent, they come out victorious more often than not.

Any time they face a more established team or bigger names, though, the outcome isn't quite so good. The Lucha Brothers have been scoring wins over them to the point that The Dark Order wasn't factored into the tournament to determine the next challengers for the AEW World Tag Team Championship.

Over this summer, they've been unable to thwart The Elite, in particular. At best, they've backed up "Hangman" Adam Page during some beatings, but even then, they haven't come out of all those scuffles on top.

Things came to a head during an elimination match at Fight for the Fallen where the faction lost not only their potential tag team title shots, but also Page's status as No. 1 contender. And their friend and hopeful recruit was now left without an opportunity to face Kenny Omega at All Out.

Because of this, Page has seemingly cut ties with them, and it has led to in-fighting. A group that was once the most close-knit in AEW is now pointing fingers at each other over who screwed everything up.

At first, it seemed Jinder Mahal would have a good summer when he defeated Jeff Hardy twice after returning to action. However, things quickly turned sour once he crossed paths with his former 3MB stablemate, Drew McIntyre.

Despite their friendship, The Modern Day Maharaja took offense to the Scot's time as WWE champion and took it upon himself to get in the way of that happening again.

Mahal stole The Scottish Warrior's family sword in an attempt to get under his skin, just to find out it was a replica. His plan failed. Instead, it riled up McIntyre even more, and he wrecked Mahal's motorcycle in retaliation and has chased him down with the real sword ever since.

Mahal cost McIntyre the Money in the Bank briefcase, but that fired up his enemy to yet another level.

The Maharaja spent July and August running away from McIntyre until the Scot beat him clean in the middle of the ring at SummerSlam.

Veer and Shanky have been belittled alongside Mahal and fled from McIntyre every week. Shanky has also had to suffer over 20 chair shots, leaving his back looking a mess (above).

Most recently, Veer and Mahal lost this week on Raw to The Viking Raiders, signaling they can't even get a proper footing in the largely overlooked tag team division.

The first few months of 2021 were extremely kind to Bianca Belair, who won the women's Royal Rumble match and defeated Sasha Banks in the main event of the first night of WrestleMania 37 to win the SmackDown Women's Championship.

Following that, she kept finding herself more and more frustrated. Bayley simply laughing at her was enough to trigger The EST of WWE into multiple title matches.

The finale of that, set for Money in the Bank in July, failed to happen when Bayley was injured, causing Belair to be taken off the card.

Following a series of do-nothing matches against Carmella and Zelina Vega, it was set up for Belair to face Banks once again at SummerSlam, only for that match to also be pulled.

Worst of all, the replacement was Becky Lynch, who beat Belair for the title in mere seconds.

Now, instead of a dominant champion, she has no title after being humiliated and the legacy of her run is essentially beating Bayley and Carmella multiple times, which isn't living up to the hype of her initial title win and her potential.

Belair is talented enough to have a much better run in the future, but this one wasn't all that it was cracked up to be.

Perhaps more than anyone on this list, Bronson Reed has suffered the biggest 180-degree shift in his career over the summer.

At first, he won the North American Championship from Johnny Gargano on May 18. It was his biggest highlight so far in professional wrestling and a sign he was on the upswing.

In June, Reed started wrestling dark matches on the main roster and scored a victory over Drew Gulak on Main Event. It was an indication he was likely going to be fast-tracked to either Raw or SmackDown.

When he lost the North American Championship on June 29, it felt as though this was a sign the call-up was coming. But, after losing to Adam Cole on July 21, he was promptly released from WWE.

In the span of two months, he achieved his career highlight only to be fired as one of the many budget cuts. To go from WWE treating you like you're the future to someone who isn't worth the money to keep on the roster must be jarring.

Jonah Rock will bounce back elsewhere, as he's proved himself a commodity. But this whirlwind of high hopes and a big fall of disappointment underlined a tumultuous summer.

On paper, Chris Jericho has had five wins and one loss this summer, starting with the Stadium Stampede match on May 30 at Double or Nothing.

That's not bad, but what makes this a rough summer for The Demo God is the road he's taken along the way.

In order to get another match against Maxwell Jacob Friedman, he had to go through what were called The Five Labours of Jericho: a series of matches that took him to his limit.

At first, he was successful in beating Shawn Spears in a match where The Chairman could use a steel chair, but Jericho couldn't. The veteran went into arguably the toughest task in a No Rules match against Nick Gage that saw him bruised, bloody and scarred.

More old wounds were opened against Juventud Guerrera, and he was beaten down even more against Wardlow, before finally reaching his goal...only for MJF to beat him.

Now, Jericho finds himself putting his career on the line for one more chance at his rival. If Le Champion is unable to beat MJF, he'll no longer compete in the ring for AEW.

It would have been better to lose the first challenge and not go through an entire month just to be disappointed and have to wager his career for a rematch, especially since he might actually lose at All Out.

The Eva-Lution hasn't exactly been a successful one. Since Eva Marie's return, she has wrestled five times and lost three of those.

Naturally, the ones she won weren't down to her, as she relied primarily on her underling, Doudrop.

That partnership was an immediate disaster, though. Rather than reaping the benefits of her powerful protege, Eva Marie managed to turn her against her from the outset.

For weeks, Eva Marie was also tormented by Alexa Bliss and made to look like a fool, tripping over herself and being freaked out by Bliss' puppet, Lilly.

Marie lost her match against The Goddess at SummerSlam, and Doudrop immediately cut ties with her, making fun of her for having come up short in the contest.

Now, Marie has one more enemy on the roster in Doudrop and nobody to back her up.

The Miz and John Morrison have tried to make things fun, but they've been on the losing side more often than not.

Bad Bunny and Damian Priest defeated them at WrestleMania 37, and The Archer of Infamy has continued to be a thorn in their side for months.

The Miz was attacked by zombie at WrestleMania Backlash in May and suffered the first serious injury in his career. And his subsequent time in a wheelchair was then exposed as a fake.

This caused the tension between the two, which boiled over on the August 23 edition of Raw when The A-Lister attacked his friend and teammate.

All they have to show for the past few months is a series of losses, other Superstars making fun of them and the end of their partnership.

It's been roughly a year since Dominik Mysterio joined WWE, and he's finally been able to wrestle in front of a crowd for the past few weeks. Unfortunately, though, there haven't been many moments worth celebrating.

After winning the SmackDown Tag Team Championships with father Rey in May, the Mysterios found themselves challenged by The Usos.

At Money in the Bank, Jimmy and Jey captured the tag titles and have been beating Dominik ever since, including at SummerSlam.

The more this happens, the more Dominik gets frustrated with Rey's guidance. It's clear there is a divide growing between them and when they finally split, we'll look at this summer as the reason why.

Once upon a time, Karrion Kross was the unstoppable juggernaut of NXT. That wasn't so long ago. In fact, it was right up until July, when WWE decided to welcome him to the Raw roster with a loss against Jeff Hardy.

It was a terrible first impression for those who don't regularly watch the black-and-gold brand and instantly made him seem like just another big guy who couldn't get the job done.

Hardy was forced to sit out for two weeks, derailing any momentum for a program between the two if that had been WWE's plan. After beating Keith Lee, Kross suffered another loss in return to The Limitless One, before getting back on track and taking out The Charismatic Enigma twice.

However, Kross then lost the NXT Championship to Samoa Joe at TakeOver 36.

In the meantime, he's seemingly lost Scarlett by his side, no longer has his cool entrance and has been saddled with some ridiculous new ring gear.

These past few weeks have taken Kross from a Brock Lesnar-type monster to someone who has to work his way back up the card.

Anthony Mango is the owner of the wrestling website Smark Out Moment and the host of the podcast show Smack Talk on YouTube, iTunes and Stitcher. You can follow him on Facebook and elsewhere for more.