10 Wrestlers Struggling To Prove Their Worth To WWE
7. Dolph Ziggler
Dolph Ziggler is a victim of horrendous and inconsistent booking, true - but then, so are the vast majority of his peers. There is no favourable curve against which to measure the Show-Off and thus, short of a valid "excuse", he receives little sympathy from the hardcore fanbase that once lionised him as a future/wasted main event talent. Ziggler is one of two things.
He's either the main event act he has told us, time and time again, he is capable of being.
Or, alternatively, he is the gatekeeper WWE positioned him as throughout 2017, a year in which he floundered.
WWE sees him as neither, it seems. He doesn't provoke the unmistakeable reactions that convinced the company to book AJ Styles as a reliable rainy day WWE Champion - nor has he cultivated the gravitas required of a legend. He is, to quote Avon Barksdale, a man without a country - which explains, without quite justifying, the shoddy creative treatment the man was subjected to following a spectacularly unnecessary and damaging heel turn.
When he abandoned the United States Championship, he developed an intrigue naturally missing from such an over-exposed presence - but there's always the fear that WWE will in turn abandon the development.