In wrestling, a decade is an extremely long time. Given how ever-changing the landscape of the business is, when you look back 10 years at any given moment, you’ll find that the world that greets you is almost unrecognisable to what it is today. Wrestlers, writers and backstage figures come and go seemingly month to month in WWE, with the only constant seemingly being Vince McMahon and his merry band of mad old men, it means that a lot of change can occur in no time flat.
However, every now and then it’s nice to look back at what was, and see what some of the highlights and lowlights were from years past. With 2020 being just weeks away, now seems like as good a time as any to look back on both the best and the worst of WWE from the past decade, and we’ll be starting off today, with the worst.
8 – Roman Reigns’ booking
Now, I’ve been a staunch defender of Roman Reigns for many years now, I think he’s got a great look, and when he’s given good material and the right opponent, he can tell amazing stories and put on amazing matches. That said, creative really did him no favours at all.
After The Shield broke up one fateful night in May 2014, it was clear that all three guys were destined for big things, but none bigger than Roman Reigns. Being labelled “The Big Dog” playing off of The Shield’s moniker of “The Hounds of Justice”, it was obvious that Roman Reigns was going to become the next John Cena, there was just one problem.
As much as Roman Reigns shone in The Shield, as a singles competitor, he still had a long way to come, compare that to Rollins and Ambrose, who were already total packages and the fans rejected Reigns outright. In an era were the wrestling landscape was shifting to favour, smaller and more athletic styles of wrestlers, Roman seemed like the personification of the old way of doing things, the John Cena way, which everyone was well and truely tired of by 2014.
Every year, in the build to Wrestlemania, WWE creative would try to make Roman the top guy, and have the fans shout it down every single time. He won the 2015 Royal Rumble in a finish so bad that even The Rock couldn’t get him cheered because everyone wanted a returning Daniel Bryan to win instead. In 2016, Roman was getting cheered for the first time thanks to Sheamus being WWE Champion, but it was soon squandered when he became Triple H’s opponent for Wrestlemania when the fans were desperate for it to be Dean Ambrose’s time instead. In 2017, he was pit against The Undertaker in the main event of Wrestlemania, beating him and doing, what we thought at the time was retiring him, which went over about as well as you’d imagine, and in 2018, he main evented against Brock Lesnar in a match the fans didn’t even give a chance before booing it out of the building.
All they had to do, during any of these attempts was to turn the guy heel. When Roman stops talking and starts destroying fools is when he’s at his best, and we never got to see that Roman during any of these main events. The fans seemed to have cooled on Roman for now, but if they ever try the same thing again, there’s no way that it’s going to go down well. However, Reigns is perhaps just one example in a much bigger problem for WWE this past decade…
7 – Lack of Likable Babyfaces
As we’ll cover in “best” list, this decade has had a handful of mega-faces come through WWE. The kind of wrestlers that the fans love no matter what they do and will cheer relentlessly until they succeed, the problem here is that in most of those cases, it didn’t happen by design. CM Punk, Daniel Bryan, Kofi Kingston, all of those guys became these “mega-faces” on their own and, for the most part, WWE was actively trying to push against their rises until it was deniable.
This highlights a key problem that WWE has had for a long time now, which is that the people behind the scenes cannot book a likeable babyface to save their lives.
Ever since John Cena got as big as he did, WWE seems to have this idea that if they book EVERY face like John Cena, everyone will get as big as John Cena, but trying to make lightning strike twice is a stupid idea and it’s lead to every single babyface from this decade feeling like they’re exactly the same character. They walk around the place all-smiles, telling the fans how happy they are to be here and just trying to do the right thing and while that is a character that can work for some, for most it leads to the crowd getting bored of them.
I’ve covered Roman Reigns’ abysmal time as a babyface, but his Shield brethren have both suffered from similar problems during this decade. When Dean Ambrose first broke out as a face from The Shield in 2014, WWE seemed determined to shy away from the unhinged violent character that wanted to rip his opponents in half and instead had him doling out “whacky-lines”, squirting ketchup & mustard in people’s faces and beating up dummies with Seth Rollins’ wigs. Speaking of Seth Rollins, he was no different, he spent all of 2018 working his ass off, putting on some of the best matches of the year to the point where the fans got behind him full force, until suddenly he became Universal Champion and started getting booked like every other good-guy on the face of the planet, being drowned out by story and not letting his amazing in-ring ability (which is what got him over) speak for itself, to the point where just a month ago they were forced to turn him heel because the fans wouldn’t stop booing him.
As much as this is a problem at the top of the card, where it really hurts people is in the mid-card, there have been plenty of guys like Cesaro, Ricochet or Cody Rhodes who spent years trying to get over in the mid-card, with the fans loving their wrestling ability, but not caring about their characters because there was nothing making it stand out from the rest of the pack. I know a problem like that can’t be put entirely on the writing staff and you could argue that a truly great performer would “make it work” but honestly, the only person I can think of since the turn of the millennium who’s had the pure mic skill to make the goofy stuff work for them is John Cena and when you look at how someone like Cody has done since leaving WWE, it’s hard to deny that there’s got to be some sort of problem with the way WWE does things.
6 – Wasted Talent
In amongst WWE trying to push “their guy” to the moon, you have countless examples this decade of guys with all the potential in the world being totally wasted. This is nothing new of course, but thanks to the sheer volume of talent that was in WWE this past decade, it seems more egregious than ever before.
Guys like CM Punk and Daniel Bryan almost had their big runs squandered, but thankfully the fans pulled through and forced WWE’s hand both times. Then you’ve got guys like Dean Ambrose who, despite winning the WWE title, it never really felt like the company was actually getting behind them as top stars. I could carry on listing people all day that should be in the top spots right now but aren’t due to WWE’s lack of foresight.
Samoa Joe, Rusev, Cody Rhodes, Sami Zayn, Cesaro; Need I go on? Chad Gable, The Revival, Bobby Roode, EC3, Damien Sandow, Wade Barret, Emma, Asuka, Neville; I’m gonna keep going. Luke Harper, Apollo Crews, Mojo Rawley, Curtis Axel, Tyler Breeze, Andrade; Seriously, I could do this all day. Hideo Itami, Zack Ryder, Fandango, Sasha Banks, Braun Strowman, Gallows & Anderson and the entire Cruiserweight Division; and that’s just off of the top of my head.
I get not everyone can be a top star and if you push everyone then you end up pushing no-one, but when you’ve got 5 hours of TV a week (9 on weeks with PPVs), you seriously can’t find time for some of your most talented stars? If Triple H does truely believe that WWE is a play and everyone has their role, then how come so many wrestlers are left without a part to play?
5 – Overreliance on Legends
Everyone loves a nostalgia act, I know I do, I still get excited whenever The Undertaker or The Rock shows up on WWE TV and I wasn’t even watching during those guy’s heydays.
However, along the way, WWE seems to have forgotten exactly what the purpose of bringing in the stars from yesteryear is supposed to achieve. With the arguable exception of The Undertaker, the point of bringing in these legends is to help boost the stock of the current stars with cross-generational dream matches. Even if the matches themselves aren’t that great, the fact that they happened is what mattered, so that the current stars can have that notch in their cap of beating one of the all-time greats.
Unfortunately, over this decade, WWE seems to have shied away from that idea and instead things that the best thing to do with these legends is to try and make them their top stars again, giving them main event spots against each other like it was the nineties and drowning out the newer talent. Don’t get me wrong, I have the greatest love and respect for what these guys did for the business, but Goldberg and The Rock did not need to be world champions in 2017 and 2013 respectively. The real problem here is that in both of those cases, the legends winning the world title ended up doing major damage to a current star. Goldberg beating Kevin Owens in 2017 relegated Owens’ main-event worthy feud with Jericho to the match on Wrestlemania 33 that no-one remembers, while The Rock beating Punk in 2013 killed Punk’s 434-day title reign and robbed him of his Wrestlemania main event, which likely played a big part in him leaving the company the next year.
Even when they’re not wrestling, WWE have used legends to try and pop the TV ratings and the problem with doing that (aside from the law of diminishing returns) is that they never provide any long-term rating increases. The best example as to why is Smackdown’s debut episode on FOX in October 2019, all of these legends showed up to the show and did their bits, leading to a massive debut rating for Smackdown, however this was at the cost of giving the current stars their time to shine, so the roughly 1 million new viewers who were watching WWE for the first time in a long time had no reason to tune in the next week because they still had no idea who the stars that would be wrestling every week were and sure enough, about half of those new viewers didn’t come back for week 2.
It’s the epitome of getting short-term gain for long-term loss, which is a huge problem for WWE and if it carries on into the next decade then it’s going to cause even bigger problems.
4 – No Face of the Company
This is a problem that’s the culmination of everything I’ve covered so far because the fact of the matter is that right now, WWE does not have a “face of the company” and that is a big problem.
For decades, WWE has always had some kind of household name, a guy like Hulk Hogan or Stone Cold or John Cena, the kind of guy that even people who’ve never watched wrestling know the name of and that is something WWE is sorely lacking right now. Admittedly they tried with Roman Reigns, but we’ve already covered how and why that failed, but ever since it doesn’t seem like WWE has ever even tried to get behind someone in order to elevate them to that “mega-star” level that even Vince McMahon himself has said they’re lacking.
Ok, so WWE doesn’t have a “face of the company” why does that matter? Us fans have never cared about that anyway.
That is true, but a guy like Austin or Cena is the key to bringing new viewers to the product, which if the ratings for the past few years have been any indication, WWE is utterly failing at doing right now. If someone knew about John Cena and heard about some cool-sounding story he was currently in, then there’s a chance that person might tune in specifically to see what John Cena’s doing. Then, while they’re tuned in they’ll get a chance to see all of the other stars that they’ve never heard of wrestle, they might even find they like some of those guys and become interested in what they’re doing and just like that you’ve got a new regular viewer.
WWE needs that “household name” in order to draw new people in because currently there’s no-one that your average Monday night TV viewer cares about enough to change the channel to watch. Having a “face of the company” isn’t there for the benefit of the fans, it’s there for the benefit of current fans to slowly bring them into the fold.
WWE is currently having a huge problem bringing in new fans and fixing this problem in the coming decade could be the biggest fix they could make.
3 – Brock Lesnar’s Return
When people talk about everything they hate about WWE these days, the one man who stands as the prime example of all that, is Brock Lesnar.
Don’t get me wrong, Lesnar’s return has had some major upsides (and trust me, I’ll be talking about those very soon) but the fact remains that Lesnar’s presence has been a major detriment to the quality WWE’s product at several points during this decade.
Lesnar’s return didn’t get off to the best of starts, the night he returned was awesome, however he was immediately fed a loss at the hand of John Cena, which pissed everyone off, then he entered a feud with Triple H, where despite the fact he got two wins against The Game, the only match anyone remembers is the Wrestlemania match where he lost. Come summer 2013, he finally notched a memorable and meaningful win, however, it was against CM Punk, so everyone was annoyed about Punk being “jobbed out” to Lesnar. Then Wrestlemania 30 happened. Lesnar ending The Undertaker’s legendary undefeated streak is a decision that remains extremely controversial to this day, but there are two things we can all agree on. One, the match suuuucked and two, it set everything that happened in the main event scene for the rest of the decade in motion.
At Summerslam 2014, Lesnar picked up the WWE title for the first time since his 2012 return and proceeded to never defend it until 2015, where the combination of Lesnar’s lack of appearances and Reigns’ overabundance of appearances led to a Wrestlemania main event where the crowd didn’t want either man to win…twice. This cycle continued for the whole decade, where Lesnar would win a world title, disappear for months on end, defend it in a sub-ten-minutes, boring-ass match then go away for another 3-4 months.
Even when Lesnar finally loses whichever world title he’s currently holding hostage, it never lasts. Once he loses a title, he goes away for another 3-4 months, until he suddenly comes back and instantly wins the world title again, it’s laughable how predictable and boring it is. Despite having two world titles in WWE since 2016, it’s constantly felt like there’s only been one because over half the time, Lesnar’s sitting out on his ranch “looking at his land” (his words) not giving a damn about anything other than the 7 figure paychecks he picks up for 10 minutes worth of work every few months.
Brock Lesnar has been one of the most consistently boring wrestlers in all of WWE this past decade, which is not helped by the fact that he’s always in the main event and if the past couple of months are any indication, that isn’t ending anytime soon.
2 – The Saudi Arabia Deal
Perhaps the single most controversial thing WWE has ever done, the 10 year deal WWE signed with the country of Saudia Arabia in 2018 is something that has done nothing but bring negative press to the WWE and honestly, the only reason I didn’t rank this as number 1, is because I didn’t want to end the list on such a politically charged note.
If you’re unaware, the Saudia Arabia government is one that has had no shortage of shady dealings in recent years. It’s a country where women are still treated as the lower class, not being legally allowed to drive along with so many other restrictions that I don’t want to speak of. Naturally, the Saudi Arabian government has been looking to push the international perception of their country away from those kinds of dealings and arguably the biggest of those pushes has been through its sporting board. Enter WWE.
When WWE announced their first show “Greatest Royal Rumble” for April 2018 for Saudi Arabia, people saw it as a bit odd and many weren’t happy with the deal, but there wasn’t any kind of uproar or major pushback. The show happened and it was fine, nothing spectacular, but it also didn’t tear the house down and we were all happy to forget about it. Until reports surfaced after the show that government officials of Saudi Arabia were allegedly “furious” that a woman had been broadcast in one of the adverts for Backlash, which was scheduled to take place the following Sunday.
Things got worse for WWE later that year as in October of 2018, less than a month before the first “Crown Jewel” event was set to take place, a US-based Saudi journalist was murdered in EXTREMELY suspicious circumstances that I won’t go into here. Then, as recently as two months ago, there was a massive problem about almost the entire roster being stuck in the country after the second “Crown Jewel” event was finished.
Even if we put all of the politics and bad business aside, the shows weren’t even worth watching. Through a combination of heat, jetlag and generally low-morale, the matches on the shows are almost always sub-par in quality, a feeling which is only amplified when you put 50+-year-old guys like Undertaker and Goldberg in the main event spot.
It’s a deal that, only two years in, has given WWE more bad-press than it’s received since the 90’s steroid trial and produced four shows that are mediocre at best and downright awful at worst, with virtually no good coming from it.
1 – The Death of Tag Team Wrestling
The simple, cold, hard fact of the matter is that in WWE right now, Tag-Team wrestling simply does not matter.
That’s not to say there haven’t been some fantastic Tag Team matches in WWE in the past ten years, of course, there has, but the fact remains that for almost the entire decade (and especially in the current day) the Tag Team Championships in WWE have been treated as afterthoughts. Almost every tag team that has won the titles in recent memory are simply two random singles stars who got thrown together because management didn’t have anything better for them to do.
For the most part, dedicated tag team wrestlers are barely featured and often buried in the wake of the thrown together random-teams that get given the titles instead. In the past decade, the only two teams who did anything meaningful with the Raw or Smackdown Tag team titles were The New Day and The Usos, but two credible teams does not make a division and the longer the years have gone on with WWE refusing to get behind Tag teams that stay together for longer than 6 months the longer it has become painfully obvious that the titles are entirely worthless.
Even though, as I write, The Viking Raiders are the Raw Tag Team Champions – a team who is absolutely fantastic in every way – I have no faith that they will be able to restore the belts to any kind of prestige, because it’s likely that in a month or so they’ll get pinned by the brand new team of Bobby Lashley and Curtis Axel for no real reason and we’ll be back to square one.
Things looked to maybe be picking up earlier this year with the introduction of the women’s tag team championships, but withing two months of their introduction they were gone from TV, being defended a whopping three times over a period of 4 months and at least one of those matches ended in a non-finish.
Meanwhile, literally, every other promotion on the planet (even NXT) is proving that tag team wrestling can be just as good, if not better than singles wrestling to the point where it was one of AEW’s main points when they were beginning to push what they would do better than WWE.
WWE has no shortage of flaws in its week-to-week product, but dedicating time to rebuilding the tag team division to the status it had in the late ’90s would fill such a huge gap in programming right now and remove a whole bunch of matches that feel inconsequential to the fans.
And that’s it! Thank you very much for taking the time to read this, let me know your thoughts either in the comments below or on Twitter @10ryawoo and finally, make sure to come back this time tomorrow for my run down of the BEST of WWE this decade!
The Strong Style Smark 