10 Most Important Matches In Modern Wrestling History
8. Royal Rumble Match - WWE Royal Rumble 2015
According to Wikipedia, the 2015 Royal Rumble match lasted 59 minutes and 31 seconds.
Vince McMahon could have saved everybody a lot of time by simply appearing in the ring, holding up the arm of Roman Reigns, and screaming "F*CK YOU!" down the lens of the hard camera.
For that, for all intents and purposes, is what he did.
You were smacked on the nose not with a set of papers but with mediocre pro wrestling. You wanted certain wrestlers - Dolph Ziggler, Dean Ambrose, Bray Wyatt - to get a push. Yeah, they got a push: pushed out of the ring by Kane and the Big Show. They were actually depicted as bags of trash. They were picked up and thrown out like you would actual shoot bags of trash, from behind your hip.
It wasn't all bad, though!
You know when you have a bag of trash, but one that's neatly tied up and full but not too full, so you can be confident that it can be thrown hard into a bin without the threat of trash juice exploding all over you?
They were thrown like that: firmly and to-the-point. Not cagily, gingerly.
Ambrose et al. weren't garbage juice, so there's that.
Oh, also, Daniel Bryan, the hottest babyface in the world, whom WWE didn't even need to put in the match because you didn't expect it this time, was dumped out by Wyatt in 10 minutes. Didn't even build to a WrestleMania match.
Roman is the star. Nobody else. Accept it and shut up.
That was the story of the entire match - and people despised the idea of the babyface Roman push.
WWE throughout the 2010s promoted a cornucopia of F*CK YOU matches - matches that told the vocal hardcore fan that WWE was not remotely interested in servicing them. CM Punk Vs. Triple H at Night of Champions, shortly following which the anti-authority renegade was re-cast as a scab, was one of them. The hardcores knew at that moment that nothing would "change". Daniel Bryan Vs. Sheamus at WrestleMania XXVIII backfired on them and how, but that too was a F*CK YOU match. The 2014 Royal Rumble was also a F*CK YOU match. The Jinder Mahal title win: F*CK YOU.
The 2015 Rumble was different, though. Fans weren't raw in their emotion; they just accepted it. The jeering wasn't loud. It was just a sort of drone. #CancelWWENetwork trended worldwide in its wake, and while WWE's viewership was in decline throughout the decade, the excellent Brandon Thurston of Wrestlenomics determined that the match accelerated the pattern.
This match more than any other fractured the relationship between WWE and the "Universe": does AEW exist without it?