10 Shocking WWE Superstar Firings No One Saw Coming

Nobody likes losing their job, but it must come as a particularly harsh blow when news of your impending unemployment is announced to the world via a generic template posted on WWE.com.

This fate has recently befallen the likes of Emma, Darren Young, and NXT upstart Sawyer Fulton, all of whom were unceremoniously taken off Vince McMahon's payroll last month for reasons they may never fully understand.

The latest batch of departees, however, could perhaps at least have seen their sackings coming. Which is to say that none of them were exactly playing what you would call a staple role in WWE programming in the weeks and months prior to their being released.

Other dismissals, however, seem to come almost completely out of blue - wrestlers who seemed to be at the very heart of the company's future plans suddenly being dumped for minor (and, to the untrained eye, trivial) infractions.

Sometimes WWE gives its employees the marching order before news of their infractions have even reached the outside world, as though they are somehow trying to distract whatever looming PR disaster is heading their way with a bombshell of their own.

At one point, it looked like WWE were about to hand Alberto Del Rio the keys to the kingdom. He won the Royal Rumble and the Money in the Bank briefcase within a year of his debut, and later claimed the WWE Championship twice.

It came a quite a shock, in other words, when the former AAA star was fired in August 2014 just a couple of weeks after challenging for the Intercontinental Title at the previous month's Battleground.

Reports that circulated in the months after claimed that Del Rio was given his marching orders because of unprofessional conduct; namely, getting into a scrap with a co-worker after they were alleged to have made a "racist" remark.

Fighting another of your company's employees - whatever the provocation - is probably going to land you in hot water, but this is WWE we're talking about. Backstage fights seem to happen every week - even the chairman is getting involved in them - so perhaps there were other reasons they wanted him gone. Reasons we probably won't ever know.