10 Times WWE Totally BOTCHED The Royal Rumble
2. 2014
Not the first Rumble to go south (and regrettably not the last), the menace and malice felt within the building during the 2014 edition of the beloved match remains the sort that simply won't exist now that AEW does.
Fans booing the shocking treatment of CM Punk, the horribly misguided babyface return of Dave Batista and the tone deaf lack of Daniel Bryan in the match at all still had the energy to protest. This is simply not the case now. The took the money they used to spend to be angry at WWE events and spent it on enjoying AEW ones instead. There are numbers and metrics and slabs of other objective measures that show this.
If chasing punters away from your product doesn't even really count as a botch in the era of ginormous rights fees and blood money regimes, simply look at the aftermath to judge the scale of the self-own. Bryan wrestled twice at WrestleMania XXX a few months later, opening and closing the event to euphoric adoration and critical acclaim. For the company to p*ss this energy away on their second biggest show of the year was careless at best and criminally negligent at its worst.
Doing it again would have been even stupider...