Ranking EVERY 2020 WWE Pay-Per-View From Worst To Best

Reigns turns, Randy fries The Fiend and The Undertaker says farewell. Which WWE show topped the lot?

Randy Orton Bray Wyatt Fiend
WWE Network

A strange thing happened on the way to fatalistic apathy and catastrophically low television ratings for WWE in 2020 - their pay-per-views no-sold the company's week-on-week plight.

That's not to say the medium was the home of WWE at its most polished, nor even its most watchable. But when the company did good things, they usually happened on Sundays. More often than not, the last day of the week became the first one of another month watching Raw and SmackDown hoping in vain to find something as energetically paced and handled as well as the thing you'd just watched.

There were some shows that were truly abysmal, yet more that were subjectively excellent. Locations ranged from a jam-packed baseball stadium to an empty one, with gyms and arenas and ThunderDomes reflecting the difficult and ever-changing times we've all endured thus year. Often wrapped within three hours, the scaling back of an hour or so helped cards immensely, particularly at the height of the global health crisis.

We are not (yet) back at that point, but 2020 revealed the bizarre lengths WWE will go to even we all end up right back where we started. From the experimental to the exceptional, this was how every one of the year's main roster supercards stacked up...

13. The Horror Show At Extreme Rules

Randy Orton Bray Wyatt Fiend
WWE.com

The Good: Faintest praise, but Cesaro and Shinsuke Nakamura's tables match with The New Day was energetic enough to start the show on a high before a parade of dismal lows.

The Bad: Drew McIntyre and Dolph Ziggler's WWE Championship match might have been okay had it not been ruined by a stupid stipulation that the wrestlers really struggled to stick to.

The Ugly: Where the f*ck to start? Seth Rollins poked Rey Mysterio's eye out of its socket with the corner of the steel stairs then threw up everywhere. Asuka and Sasha Banks were having an awesome Raw Women's Championship match before a pigsh*t thick finish that made fools of the competitors and Bayley just to set up a TV rematch. The Swamp Fight between Bray Wyatt and Braun Strowman was yet another laughable attempt at the cinematic from a company that had clearly peaked with their first efforts at WrestleMania. This was - and easily so - one of the worst WWE pay-per-views ever.

Contributor
Contributor

Michael is a writer, editor, podcaster and presenter for WhatCulture Wrestling, and has been with the organisation nearly 8 years. He primarily produces written, audio and video content on WWE and AEW, but also provides knowledge and insights on all aspects of the wrestling industry thanks to a passion for it dating back over 35 years. As one third of "The Dadley Boyz" Michael has contributed to the huge rise in popularity of the WhatCulture Wrestling Podcast and its accompanying YouTube channel, earning it top spot in the UK's wrestling podcast charts with well over 62,000,000 total downloads. He has been featured as a wrestling analyst for the Tampa Bay Times, GRAPPL, GCP, Poisonrana and Sports Guys Talking Wrestling, and has covered milestone events in New York, Dallas, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, London and Cardiff. Michael's background in media stretches beyond wrestling coverage, with a degree in Journalism from the University Of Sunderland (2:1) and a series of published articles in sports, music and culture magazines The Crack, A Love Supreme and Pilot. When not offering his voice up for daily wrestling podcasts, he can be found losing it singing far too loud watching his favourite bands play live. Follow him on X/Twitter - @MichaelHamflett