10 Times WWE Repeated History
7. The Crowds Get As Loud As The Yes Movement, But WrestleMania Never Falls On Rusev Day
To compare Daniel Bryan's Yes Movement and the Rusev Day chants would be a little generous to current AEW star Miro's biggest WWE success story. But the company's attempted - and in the latter case, victorious - burials were worryingly identical.
Bryan's 2013/14 arc was cynically documented by WWE as they tried to reclaim it as if the whole shoddy affair was by design. In the years that followed it, Rusev's own road to run was given no such attention, because there was no happy ending to spin it.
By December 2017, "Rusev Day" was the closest thing WWE had to a phenomenon. Chants dominated shows, including matches that didn't even feature 'The Bulgarian Brute'. His unit with sidekick Aiden English was the hottest thing on the show, audiences splashed the drab SmackDown spotlights with the the whites, greens and reds of the Bulgarian flag and calendars with 365 identical days were top sellers on WWEShop.com.
As later revealed by Miro himself, Vince McMahon thought that the adoring public were simply mocking the gimmick. Though not beaten down into the dirt as Daniel Bryan had been, Rusev never won the big one, nor received shots or opportunities that reflected his sudden popularity.
The ramifications from it are still being felt today, with a very understandable "why try?" mentality emerging from those that have seen too many internal failures to keep on keeping on.