9 Wrestlers Who Had Their WORST Match EVER This Year
Stinking up the joint: featuring Cope, Sami Zayn, and more…
In November, WWE Chief Content Officer and Dana White cosplayer Triple H claimed, on the All-In podcast, that his promotion doesn’t “write the shows based on “that would be a great match””. And, while that would adequately explain the big Jey Uso push of 2025, he’s still not entirely correct. Triple H books matches for the explicit purpose of putting on a “banger” every week.
Every promoter in wrestling does the same thing, and as a result, the bad match isn’t nearly as prevalent as it used to be.
The outright stinker, the dud, no longer exists - at least in the way we used to know it. Wrestling is no longer teeming with the uncoordinated meatheads summoned from gyms in the 1980s, and the industry is nowhere near as funny as a result. The average roster is too skilled mechanically. The bad match needs to be redefined. Where once it was the glorious art of a dumbass getting completely lost, or a barely trained glorified bodybuilder having no clue how to execute their stuff, now, in this era of homogenised style, it’s about something else.
It’s about how the sheer desperation to have the best match results in soulless, cringeworthy irony.
It’s about the modern “cinema” trend, and how the abysmal, overt attempts at acting have replaced actual crowd psychology.
It’s about the mindless trope slop of smashed barricades and ref bumps.
Obviously, this list can’t be entirely literal - but you can’t compare the match catalogue of a major league wrestler to what they were doing when they first started out. Not all of them are Kurt Angle, Jun Akiyama, or Ronda Rousey.
Some vets have no excuse.