10 WWE Stars Who Peaked Too Early
1. Wade Barrett
WWE were presented with the unique opportunity to mint a ready-made main event talent just a few months after his 2010 debut. The Nexus storyline was white hot, and as the group’s leader, Wade Barrett was at the heart of it. The winner of NXT’s first season immediately became one of WWE’s biggest villains when he led his group’s widespread assault on the WWE roster that summer, but their momentum was eventually demolished, and Barrett peaked remarkably quickly.
The group’s SummerSlam loss to a John Cena-led Team WWE hastened their decline, and the ensuing Cena vs. Barrett feud was disastrous. WWE wasted countless opportunities to legitimise him with a WWE Championship reign, but Cena cost him the belt on a number of occasions, and after a literal burial at TLC 2010, Barrett’s main event prospects were destroyed.
The Englishman went on to have a relatively successful WWE career in the aftermath, but he never looked like a true top-level threat again. Barrett left a shadow of his former self in 2016, almost six years removed from enjoying the biggest spotlight of his career, and marking him as one of WWE’s greatest recent cases of “what could have been.”