10 WWE Superstars Who Sabotaged Their Own Careers

As wrestling fans, we love to argue about office politics and who buried who: who dug whose grave and who handed them the shovel. Everyone’s got a favourite wrestler who was disrespected by the office, and everyone has some stooge they despise who’s made a career out of ending the careers of others.

It’s just how we roll… but not every career ended early due to the evil machinations of lesser men. Some wrestlers are perfectly able to f*ck their own lives up without any help from anyone.

Of course, to qualify as genuine career sabotage the offence has to be proportional to that person's unrealised potential. For example, when he was released for supposedly allowing Alicia Fox to wrestle while intoxicated, Arn Anderson was in the twilight of his legendary career, and had already accomplished everything he needed to.

Conversely, while Brad Maddox was fired for swearing at a house show crowd, he'd never really been hired for his wrestling skills; having been off television for months, his time with WWE was probably nearly at an end anyway.

This article, on the other hand, is dedicated to the men who could have gone further, faster, higher: the superstars made to be big hitters, who managed to strike out all on their own.

They say that to make it as a professional wrestler you need at least two of three things: talent, personality and discipline.

Eric Arndt had no wrestling experience prior to signing with NXT, and turned out to have no wrestling talent or discipline either: the man couldn’t work and didn’t want to.

What he had in spades was personality, having been hired on the strength of a video of himself working out and running his mouth. Paired with the not-at-all-seven-foot-tall Big Cass, Enzo Amore proved charismatic enough to get his team’s entrance over, if nothing else.

Trouble is, he was trouble. Enzo refused to dial his brash gimmick down after shows, becoming so aggravating that his fellow NXT trainees wanted nothing to do with him. If anything, as an even smaller fish in an even larger pond, the main roster was less forgiving: he was kicked out of the RAW locker room almost immediately.

Amore was first suspended, then fired when sexual assault allegations against him became public in January 2018, having neglected to tell the office that he was being investigated for allegedly raping a woman. Enzo denied everything, and four months later the police closed the file citing a lack of evidence.

Unfortunately, the man was such a godawful heat magnet backstage that no one could think of a single good reason to rehire him. Since his attention-seeking shoot appearance at last year’s Survivor Series saw him removed from the building, it’s not likely that’s going to change any time soon.