Layla El, who won the 2006 WWE Diva Search contest, announced her retirement from the company Wednesday, ending her employment almost exactly nine years after it began. A former WWE Womens and Divas Champion, Layla was the most-tenured member of the WWE womens locker room. Debuting shortly after winning the 2006 Diva Search Contest which also gave us Maryse and Rosa Mendes Layla made her first impact as part of Extreme Expose in the relaunched ECW alongside Kelly Kelly and Brooke Adams. The British beauty made her mark by joining fellow countryman William Regal, managing him to an Intercontinental Championship. Layla would then move over to Smackdown, where she and Michelle McCool would form the WWEs version of Mean Girls (or TNAs Beautiful People), LayCool. The duo would torment women for more than a year-and-a-half, most notably Mickie James in a widely panned storyline that made fun of her weight. The team would fracture and split, with Layla winning a Loser Leaves WWE match against McCool in May 2011. Laylas last notable television feud involved Summer Rae as the two initially battled over, then against, Fandango. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAFrE-V9YJQ Her decision to retire should not come as a huge surprise. She hasnt been featured on WWE programming much during the past year. Her last televised match was in early June on Main Event, and her last major program appearance was in a Divas elimination match at Survivor Series in November. She was still wrestling house shows, as it appears that her last match was a July 25th loss to Paige in Odessa, Texas. Layla retires at a time when WWE is undergoing a self-described Divas Revolution, calling up three NXT women Charlotte, Becky Lynch and Sasha Banks which made some of the lesser-used members of the Divas roster expendable. Perhaps Layla saw the call-ups as a sign that WWE didnt have anything planned for her. At the same time, nine years is a good, lengthy run for a woman in WWE. She had won both womens titles and was part of a pretty prominent faction, LayCool during her time with the company. Congratulations to Layla on her retirement, and best of luck to her in her life ahead.
Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.
