Ranking All 15 WWE Debuts & Returns From 2025

14. Nikki Bella

WWE Survivor Series: WarGames 2025 Stephanie Vaquer Nikki Bella
WWE

There might be some recency bias influencing this rating for Nikki Bella, who returned earlier this summer for one final run to compete against some of this generation’s female wrestlers.

And while the Hall-of-Famer deserves kudos for coming back and working on television fairly regularly, it’s hard to overlook how overmatch Bella has been in the ring, particularly in singles action. She hasn’t really had a good one-on-one match since returning, with her Women’s World Championship match against Stephanie Vaquer last month being terrible.

In reality, Nikki spent a great deal of her career in a tag team, and WWE should have leaned into that instead of her “record-setting Divas Champion” run. Tagging with a workhorse could have protected Bella and gotten another talent over by sharing the ring with Nikki.

Bella might have wanted to show her family and fans that she could step up with the wrestlers of today, but this run has just exposed how steep the drop in women’s wrestling talent was a decade-plus ago.

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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.