Tag: Worst

The Best of WWE in the 2010s

After getting sad about everything bad in WWE over the last decade, let’s pick oursleves up and talk about the best.

As we’ve covered, there’s been plenty to be upset about when it comes to WWE this past decade and given the IWC’s tendency to focus in on the negatives, it can be easy to trick yourself into thinking the 2010s were all bad for WWE, however, given that you’ve read the title of this article, I doubt it will surprise you when I say that this was not the case.

No matter how bad you think WWE has been over the past ten years (and for the record, I don’t think it’s been that bad) a broken clock is still right twice a day and some truly great things have come from Mr McMahon’s playhouse in the 2010s and here are what I think are some of the best.

9 – The New Day: Afterthoughts to World Champions

Imagine telling someone in 2014 that Big E Langston, Kofi Kingston and Xavier Woods would turn a Gospel Church gimmick into one of the greatest factions in company history.

By all accounts, The New Day should never have worked, like so many other factions that were thrown together in WWE for seemingly no reason, they debuted on TV with all the momentum of a wet fart and precisely no-one cared. It seemed like a way for WWE to give three men they had nothing for, something to do (because let’s be honest that’s what it was).  Little did anyone know, they’d secretly struck gold.

The New Day would come out at smiling babyfaces, spouting the virtues of “The Power of Positivity”, which naturally is something all wrestling fans have an aversion to, so it was quickly booed out of every arena. Instead of annoyingly pushing on as babyfaces despite the fact no-one cared, the decision was made to shift the characters. All of a sudden, The New Day would find every way possible to steal any and every win they could, culminating in them winning the Tag Tag Championships from Cesaro & Tyson Kidd in late spring 2014.

From there on, things completely took off for the New Day, their positivity was now an ironic sentiment that they used to hide the fact that they cheated all the time, then claiming they won because they believed in themselves and other nonsense. As the months went on it turned out that these three men had some of the best on-screen and creative chemistry of any wrestlers in decades and every night they’d come out and cut promos that were genuinely funny on a level that we hadn’t seen in WWE since The Rock.

They then experienced the best kind of face turn any wrestler or faction can receive, a face turn simply because the fans just couldn’t stop cheering them. Their accomplishments speak for themselves: Longest reigning Tag Team champions in WWE history, 5 Tag Title reigns over the past 4 years and plenty of great matches and memorable moments.

This brings us to Kofi Kingston, who had one of the most unexpected and brilliant rises in years. The way the fans got behind Kofi and forced WWE’s hand to no only put the WWE Championship on him, but give him a decent sized run with it is something that we very rarely see in wrestling today and it was what happened with The New Day this decade that made it possible and I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if at least one of the other memebers of the group reached the same point some time in the coming years.

What’s most impressive about The New Day though, is it took 3 guys who were probably never going to get very far in WWE as singles competitors and turned them into megastars that will be remembered forever in WWE. Xavier Woods and Big E were not in good positions in the WWE heircachy before The New Day came along, but now they’re synonymous with the current product and I can confidently claim that if there was no New Day, Kofi Kingston would never have got the WWE Championship run he’d always deserved.

An act that never got stale, and plucked three men from footnotes in WWE history to staples of the company, The New Day will certainly go down as one of the greatest factions in wrestling history.

8 – The Summer of Punk

And the year or so that followed it, but that’s not as catchy of a header.

You can think whatever you like of CM Punk’s 2014 exit from WWE, that’s not what we’re here to discuss, we’re here to talk about his greatest moments. Before CM Punk came along, it seemed like the smaller, more indie-rific stars would never truly get a chance to shine in WWE, no matter how much we cheered for them and booed the alternatives, WWE would always be a place for the John Cenas and Triple Hs of the world. Enter CM Punk.

Punk captured fans hearts with his in your face, to the point style of promos, weather as a heel or a babyface, Punk could work any crowd to feel any emotion whenever he wanted, combine this with exceptional in-ring talent and you’ve got one hell of a powder keg waiting to blow.

If Punk had received any old push from WWE management, there’s a chance his star would’ve faded far too quickly and whatever heel character he had at the time wouldn’t have maintained at the top of the card for as long as it did. Then he announced his intentions for Money in the Bank 2011. One fateful night on WWE Raw, CM Punk announced that on July 17th 2011, the night of that year’s Money in the Bank Pay-Per-View, his WWE contract expired, and he intended to leave with the WWE Championship.

This story was already blending kayfabe and reality in a way we hadn’t seen in a long time, as Punk’s contract was legitimately coming to an end on that date and he legitimately hadn’t decided yet whether or not he was going to re-sign. This was all well and good, but then something historic happened, to end an episode of Raw the next week, Punk sat at the top of the ramp and aired all of his frustrations with WWE in a part-work, part-shoot promo. This move turned many heads in the fandom and many fans who had stopped watching WWE due to its staleness were pulled back into watching thanks to this promo.

Low and behold, come Money in the bank 2011, Punk defeated Cena after a fantastic match, blew a kiss to Vinnie Mac and left WWE with the Championship…for 8 days. It’s an unfortunate truth that the aftermath of this moment was booked anywhere near as well as it should’ve, but the fact remains that it made an enternal star out of CM Punk, so much so that after being removed from our screens for over 5 years, people are still clamoring for his return.

CM Punk provided us with some of the most entertaining WWE TV we’d seen in years at that point and his success opened the door for so many others (who we’re going to talk about in a bit) to reach even greater success than Punk did. No matter what your opinion of him today is, you can’t deny that what he did in 2011 was absolutely fantastic.

7 – Depth of Talent

WWE has more wrestlers under there employ currently than ever before, a number that has skyrocketed specifically in this decade and as much as it creates problems like wasted talent that I highlighted in my “worst” article, it can also be of great benefit to the company.

While things like character work and promo ability can be debated, when it comes to atheltic ability, the WWE roster has never been as talented as it is right now. If WWE got their shit together, using the talent they’ve built upon their roster over the past ten years, they could put on the single best wrestling show in history; and I genuinely believe that. I could sit here and list countless names like I did in the previous list and I’ll be talking about specific examples further on in the list, but I genuinely believe that this is the most talented roster WWE has ever had.

There’s such a huge variety of wrestlers that they have under their belt that there really is something for everyone. You want muscle-bound superheroes who fight for what’s right? Have Roman Reigns. You want guys who can do so many flips you can’t help but be impressed? Ricochet’s got you covered. You want monsters who will destroy anyone in their path? Braun Strowman will hit the spot. You want the best technical wrestlers the world has ever seen? AJ Styles, Seth Rollins, Daniel Bryan, take your pick.

Almost every WWE PPV is a plethora of variety in wrestling, no matter what you like, there’s something for you. If you want to poke holes in the current WWE product, there are plenty of ways to do so, but one thing that you absolutely cannot fault is the wrestlers themselves.

6 – AJ Styles: Mr WWE

Speaking of that talent, let’s look over one of this decade’s biggest, and most unexpected success stories.

For so many years AJ Styles was the exact opposite of a WWE guy. He spent the largest chunk of his career making waves for TNA as the most talented person there, before eventually leaving the company and making his way over to New Japan Pro Wrestling, where he would instantly become a star. Styles led the Bullet Club and had 2 reigns with the IWGP Heavyweight Championship. So when it was announced in Janurary of 2016 that AJ Styles had signed a contract with WWE, meer hours after he had wrestled at NJPW’s Wrestle Kingdom 10 it absolutely blew everyone away.

I didn’t have much of an idea who Styles was at the time, but I quickly learnt how big of a deal this was and it’s safe to say that I was losing my shit just as hard as anyone else when he showed up in the 2016 Royal Rumble match. No-one was quite sure what kind of career Styles would have in WWE and if the man himself is to be believed, Vince only intended for him to be a mid-carder from the outset.

Ever one to push boundaries though, Styles forced those in charge to take notice of how unstoppably talented he was. A heel turn ended up being the best thing for him as it gave him all the momentum in the world going into one hell of a match with John Cena at Summerslam 2016, where he beat Cena clean as a whistle. Then it happened, against all of the odds, AJ Styles, Mr TNA, won the WWE Championship at Backlash 2016, in a move I don’t think many people expected, at least not so soon after his arrival.

Styles continued this run of success over the next few years winning the United States Championship before winning the WWE Championship a second time, holding it for over a year and being plasted on the front of posters, production trucks and video games in the process. AJ Styles is the story of exactly what can happen when WWE want to stick it to their compeitition in the best way possible. Sure, you could take Mr TNA and make him a joke on your product, or you could take Mr TNA and turn him into Mr WWE and that’s exactly what Styles is now, in the best way possible.

5 – John Cena: Jobber to the Future Stars

Another thing that I don’t think anyone could’ve seen coming at the start of this decade, is the fact that John Cena is now virtually non-existent in WWE. Having gone full Hollywood (and doing pretty well for himself in the process), over the past few years Cena has barely had a presence in WWE, not even having an official match at Wrestlemania 35.

The benefit of this transition, however, is that when Cena does show up to have a match, it’s a big deal and whoever he wrestles is bound to get a great rub, win or lose. Even more so than that, Cena’s in-ring style has changed so subtly over this decade, that it took us all a moment in 2015/2016 to realise that he’s putting on incredible matches all of a sudden. Kevin Owens, AJ Styles, Roman Reigns, Seth Rollins, Daniel Bryan . All of these matche he’s had with those guys over the past number of years have been absolute classics, especially his matches with Styles.

What’s even more amazing (and unbelievable to our 2010 viewer) is that he put all of those guys over. Admittedly he got his wins back from Owens in a major way, but that first match when Owens shockingly pinned Cena was all that was needed to launch him to the prominent status he holds today. This happened with all of the younger talent he’s wrestled since about 2015, Cena would put them over in a high profile match and it would raise that guy’s stock more than any world title win ever could and even when he did get his wins back, it didn’t matter in the long run because a star was already made.

If Cena’s going to be sticking to this one or two matches a year thing, I hope that when he does show up, this is the Cena we continue to see. Everytime he shows up it feels like a big moment and there are so many guys in WWE that could really use his magic touch.

4 – Daniel Bryan: The Best Wrestler in the World

I’ve made this claim many many times on this blog and it’s something I genuinely believe. You don’t even need to go as far back as the American Dragon, or his Ring of Honor days to see it (although they certainly help) you just need to go back to the summer of 2010 and watch from there.

Many people (myself included) claim that the WWE way of doing things can hamper performers in many ways, from a characte perspective and even in the ring there are so many times watching WWE’s product that I feel like things could be better for such-and-such person if they weren’t so constricted, just look at Jon Moxley for living proof of that. Daniel Bryan didn’t suffer from this though, well he did a bit at first, but Daniel Bryan did something which no-one else has really been able to do, at least not to his level, which is take the limitations of the WWE system and use them to his advantage.

“Limitation breeds creativity” is a phrase I’ve heard a number of times when it comes to creating art and that’s exactly what Daniel Bryan did with the limitations he was given. He moved and changed his character to fit the WWE way of doing things without compromising who he was as a wrestler, he was able to feel like a perfect fit for the WWE product, while still connected with the fans on an astronomical level, so much so that when he hit a brick wall that he couldn’t change enough to get through, the WWE fanbase shouted as loud as they could and changed WWE to make way for him.

I gave CM Punk a lot the credit earlier for the shift to the indie style of wrestling because he was the first to do it, but Daniel Bryan’s contributions to this cause cannot be understated either. Daniel Bryan smashed his way through the titanium wall WWE seemed to put in front of him and in doing so, cleared the way for the whole style of wrestling in WWE to fundamentally shift to what was seen in 2010 as a very “indie” style.

Two of my favourite moments involving the WWE Championship this past decade were thanks to Daniel Bryan, when he won the title at Wrestlemania 30 is was the most incredible feeling in the world, this amazing and lovable man has finally reached the highest point it’s possible for him to reach in his career. Then there was the sad affair of his forced retirement thanks to injuries, which was truly heartbreaking, but luckily it has a happy ending.

Daniel Bryan’s return speech is something that still makes me tear up and the line “If you fight hard enough for your dreams, eventually your dreams will fight for you” is the most motivational sentence I think I’ve ever heard. So imagine thinking that less than a year later he would be one of the most detestable heels in the entire industry. Daniel Bryan’s 2018 heel turn was an unexpected stroke of absolute genius, not did it let him work a more mat-based technical style that he’s absolutely exceptional at, but it provided us with what, to my mind at least, is the best world title reign we’ve seen since CM Punk’s 434-day reign in 2011/2012/2013.

Bryan has never remained static as a wrestler, his ability to constantly reinvent himself as a character while sticking true to his in-ring style and performing it all to absolute perfection is something that very few in the industry even come close to, let alone WWE. I could probably do a whole article about why I believe Daniel Bryan is the best wrestler in the world right now, but we don’t have that much time and this is only entry number 3. So to cut it short, he’s really freaking good and this decade has been all the example you need as to why.

3 – Brock Lesnar’s Return

When I was putting these two lists together, I couldn’t decide where to put Lesnar’s return because it had so many highs and lows to it, so in the end, I decided: why not both? In my “Worst of WWE” post, I talked about all of the crap that came from Lesnar’s return, but it’d be remiss of me to go without mentioning the many positives that came from it to.

Firstly and perhaps most importantly, is the fact that we got a lot of great matches from him. While it’s true that Lesnar’s put on no small amount of stinkers since his 2012 return there are an equal amount of fantastic bouts to go alongside them. His matches across the decade against guys like Cena, Punk, Bryan, Styles and so many others have all been barnburners that show just how valuable of an asset Lesnar is to WWE.

On top of that, there is the simple fact of “moments”. Lesnar is perhaps the best wrestlers for creating these moments because he has a feel to him that no other wrestler on the planet has. Wrestlemania 30, Summerslam 2014, Wrestlemania 31, Survivor Series 2016 and Wrestlemania 35, all of these are moments that have left a lasting impression on me and are some of the best/most shocking moments in wrestling from the past decade. You could argue that these moments are all down to the person that Lesnar was facing at the time, but that’s just not true, in fact, I’d argue the exact opposite: that these moments were only possible because it was Lesnar doing them.

Lesnar has been so consistently booked as an unstoppable monster that there came a point where, for a good 5-6 years, he felt truly undefeatable, which is a feeling that no other wrestler has had in decades. The fact of the matter is, when Lesnar loses, it’s a HUGE deal and whoever does it is instantly a star and there isn’t anyone else like that in WWE, not anymore.

Fans have spent this whole decade begging for WWE to be consistent in their booking, but the truth is there was a prime example of that staring them in the fact the whole time and his name is Brock Lesnar.

2 – NXT

I mean come on, there’s no way you can have a “best of WWE” list and not have NXT somewhere in the top 3.

At the start of the decade, NXT was nothing more than a bad reality TV show where some of the best independent wrestlers of the time (and David Otunga) were humiliated on a weekly basis and I think if you’d have told anyone that over the decade, NXT would become the most consistently brilliant wrestling promotion on the planet, they would’ve reported you to some sort of mental institution. At yet, here we are at the end of 2019, looking back at the best WWE matches of the decade and almost all of them come from the brand of yellow and black.

Despite switching from reality show to wrestling promotion in late 2012, most people didn’t take much notice until 2014, when the brand’s first special event “NXT Arrival” took place, featuring fantastic matches between the likes of Ardian Neville, Bo Dallas, Paige, Emma, Sami Zayn and Cesaro. That roll continued with what would become quarterly events known as NXT Takeover, where the best wrestlers NXT had to offer (which were more often than not, the best indie stars of the time that WWE had bothered to sign) had the best matches they possibly could and it was always pure gold.

Not only were the matches always top quality but the storylines usually matched that quality, with feuds like #DIY vs The Revival, Bayley vs Sasha Banks and Tommaso Ciampa vs Johnn Gargano that truely defined this decade in WWE. It’s clear that NXT is a creative environment, where both wrestlers and writers are allowed to work at their full potential to craft nuanced, long-term storylines that we haven’t had on Raw or Smackdown in ages.

While several NXT stars have failed to live up to their potential when called up to the main roster for one reason or another, NXT has provided us with main-stays of the current product, Seth Rollins, Roman Reigns, Kevin Owens, Drew Mcintyre, Big E; just to name a few.

NXT has given us some of the best wrestling from this past decade, proving that the “WWE Style” doesn’t have to be seen as a bad thing, because as much as we all like to deny it, NXT is the WWE Style and the show has proven the all-time classic stories and matches that style can produce and will continue to produce for years to come.

1 – Women’s Wrestling

It could never be anything else, could it?

While it’s absolutely true that all of the major wrestling companies in the world could still be doing more to legitimise their women’s divisions, comparing how female wrestlers were treated in WWE at the start of the decade to now is the kind of improvement I’m not anyone ever thought we’d see from a Vince McMahon led company.

At the very first WWE Pay-Per-View of this decade, Royal Rumble 2010, there was only one women’s match broadcast on the show and it lasted 20 seconds of a three-hour show and this was by no means an outlier, it is an accurate presentation of how WWE treated the female wrestlers under its employ for well over a decade. WWE would hire models and teach them basic wrestling moves, while the legitimate athletes were barely allowed to show their skill and were treated pretty much as eye-candy.

By the time 2014 came around, the WWE audience were starting to get sick of it all, people were starting to demand that female athletes in WWE be taken seriously and it was (unsurprisingly) NXT that heeded that call and built a women’s division full of the greatest women’s wrestlers on the planet. Paige, Emma and the four horsewomen were among the first female wrestlers in over decade that were allowed by the company to prove to the world that they’re just as good, if not better than any male star in WWE. But it still wasn’t enough.

Despite getting glimmers of great matches on the main roster throughout 2014, it was clear the company still had no intentions to make any meaningful changes, so as WWE fans always do, they got louder. At the Fastlane 2015 Pay-Per-View between Nikki Bella and Paige, a match that had all the potential to be a show-stealer, got a mere 5 minutes worth of screen-time; this was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. Within 24 hours, the #givedivasachance movement had begun and the whole wrestling world puts its foot down and let the company know that this shit wasn’t going to fly anymore.

The change was perhaps a bit slower than we would’ve liked, but sure enough, it happened. While the initial clusterfuck of Charlotte Flair, Becky Lynch and Sasha Banks all getting called up at once causing a 3 on 3 on 3 feuds was, well…awful. Soon after that, the company started to focus on these competitors as singles stars and from that point onwards, there was no stopping them.

Every woman who came through WWE from then on made sure they made as much noise as possible, putting on fantastic matches and making sure they could not be ignored. Soon female wrestlers were main-eventing Pay-Per-Views, getting their own Royal Rumble and Money in the Bank matches and just generally having their feuds and storylines treated exactly the same as any other in the company.

In 2018 we had the first-ever all-women Pay-Per-View in Evolution, which was an absolute hit and a fantastic show, Becky Lynch became the single most popular star in the whole industry and the most prestigious spot in the WWE calendar, the main event of Wrestlemania featured a women’s match for the first time ever.

Like I said at the start, the war is not won yet, but this decade proved that major change can happen in wrestling if we just stop the big companies from getting away with their bullshit for long enough. Genuine, massive and long-lasting change has been established in the way WWE treats its female athletes, which is something that cannot be understated and it is undeniable that it’s the best thing to have happened in WWE this past decade.

And there you have it! Thank you very much for taking the time to read this, please let me know what you thought of WWE this past decade either in the comments below or on Twitter @10ryawoo. Finally, make sure to come back on Saturday for my predictions for WWE TLC!

The Worst of WWE in the 2010s

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!