5 Ups & 8 Downs From John Cena's WWE Retirement Tour
2. A Wasted Half-Year
When John Cena started displaying the countdown screen indicating how many dates he had remaining on his WWE deal for 2025, it served as a way to remind fans that he really was leaving.
But during that abysmal heel run, it also served as a reminder that WWE was squandering a very finite number of appearances for Cena before it was all over. Every time he came out and simply cut a boring, repetitive promo, it was a wasted appearance, a meaningless use of Cena rather than maximizing the potential of those dates.
Cena has since revealed that there were no actual long-term plans for his heel run, just an opportunity to create a huge moment… and it showed.
By giving in to the desire to create a huge/shocking/viral moment with no real thought behind it, the resulting aftermath was a directionless, wasted five months. That’s five months of this vaunted retirement year that WWE couldn’t get back.
Consider this: Cena is a bona fide successful Hollywood actor these days. He put his career on hold for a full year to do a proper retirement tour, being open to appearing as often as possible as he said goodbye to WWE fans.
Rather than meticulously plan out a heroic arc for Cena, WWE sacrificed nearly half the year for him to deliver wooden, passionless promos and have terrible matches as fans couldn’t be asked to care about any of it. By the time he turned babyface at SummerSlam, he was into his final four months and it was a sprint to the finish.
Seeing how that final act played out only magnifies how supremely stupid and wasteful that entire heel run truly was.