10 Biggest Red Flags Waving In WWE Right Now
A farrago of factions, flops and false finishes.
WWE - as it is understandably fond of telling us - is going gangbusters right now. Full houses, phenomenal talent and mind-bogglingly huge business deals mean the former house of McMahon is sitting prettier than it has since the turn of the millennium.
Yet underneath the surface, cracks are starting to appear in the foundations of WWE's brave new world.
To be fair, no era of wrestling is perfect - the much-vaunted Attitude Era had more than a few chinks in its armour - and none of the warning signs discussed in this article are likely to prophesy doom for the world's biggest wrestling company. Yet each red flag here is a sign that the good ship WWE has taken on a few holes under the stewardship of captain Levesque, and if the deckhands aren't careful, then the whole franchise could sink back into the depths of irrelevance.
But you didn't come here for nautical metaphors (unless you did, in which case hopefully the above paragraph swabbed your deck). You came to read about the problems facing WWE, and for that, you don't have to look much further than the first RAW of 2025...
10. That Netflix Premiere
In one word: Oof. In 3,675 words: Big oof.
RAW's Netflix debut was a chance to inspire a new generation of grappling fans, as seen by Olympic sprinter Noah Lyles tweeting that it was his first ever time watching the WWE. Unfortunately, by the time RAW ended you wouldn't have blamed Noah if he wanted to run away from wrestling as fast as his gold medal winning legs could carry him.
This was simply a bad show. A painfully long, meandering miasma of uneven action, stretched out promos and inexplicable storytelling, it was as if RAW decided to enter the new era by celebrating the worst excesses of the old one. An utterly baffling situation, especially considering RAW was on something of a hot streak going in. Hell, last month's episode where the New Day broke up was, for this writer's money, the best episode of any wrestling show in 2024.
If WWE had started its life on Netflix with a show that came anywhere close to that one, they could have inspired countless new fans over the globe. As it is, it's hard to imagine anyone walking away from the Netflix debut thinking "Yes, I want to dedicate almost eight hours a week to watching this".
Yeah, about that number...