Ranking All 15 WWE Debuts & Returns From 2025

15. Brock Lesnar

WWE Wrestlepalooza 2025 Brock Lesnar John Cena
WWE

A segment of the WWE fanbase rejoiced at the return of Brock Lesnar at SummerSlam this year, ending a two-year hiatus from the company.

But Lesnar’s return would have come much sooner – at the 2024 Royal Rumble – had it not been for his being named dozens of times in the ongoing sex trafficking lawsuit filed by Janel Grant against Vince McMahon and WWE. That resulted in Brock being pulled from the Rumble and put on ice… until this summer.

Setting aside the ickiness of WWE determining it was no longer unfashionable to linked to sex trafficking, Lesnar’s return has been a huge bust, in relation to the amount of hype and the negative PR he has generated.

Showing up unannounced to lay out John Cena, Brock faced Cena one last time at Wrestlepalooza in a widely panned glorified squash, with Lesnar decimating the 17-time world champion in less than 10 minutes. It was an entirely baffling decision, since Cena had just turned back to a face and was on a redemption arc, and instead he just got mauled in a meaningless, soulless match against a guy who is no longer the ratings draw people remember from a decade ago.

A brief turn in WarGames at Survivor Series last month is his only other contribution to WWE this year – unless you count falling flat on his arse on Raw doing his entrance taunt.

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Contributor

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.