One Moment WWE Wants You To Forget From Every Year (1985 to 2026)
5. 2022 - Total Burnout
Vince McMahon had creatively bludgeoned the Royal Rumble in the 2010s, but the show and titular gimmick experienced something of a rebirth late in the decade that broadly carried over into the 2020s with surprisingly great showings either side of the global pandemic.
2022's event brought everybody's enthusiasm back down to earth with a thud, reflected one of the many on-screen nadirs of his latter years, and found a roster and alleged market leader in complete disarray. Even the scant amount of good stuff was on fire, literally so. The WrestleMania sign, by this point a totem of the season and something that's gradually become a nice annual tradition for those that have grown up with it, had to be extinguished when a small blaze took hold during the show. That happened during a roundly-ignored Becky Lynch/Piper Niven match made the situation worse - audience members looking for a distraction found the perfect one, as long as they weren't getting hit by stray flames beneath it.
It still might have been preferable to experiencing what went on during the show. Shane McMahon booked himself to dominate the bulk of the roster and did such a pathetic job that he was fired in the aftermath, Brock Lesnar and Ronda Rousey won their respective battle royals and depressed everybody (other than Ryan Satin) in the process, and the vaunted Road To WrestleMania had never looked so bleak.
Changes, eventually, were coming...