Ranking Every Men's WWE Royal Rumble Match Of The 2010s
The good, the overwhelmingly amount of bad and the Roman Reigns.
It must be stressful to be a WWE booker in January. You've got the biggest wrestling show in the world in a couple of months, meaning every single thing you do is scrutinised by the fans, and the most scrutinised PPV in the world is just around the corner - the Royal Rumble.
They never seem to get it right, do they? In the last decade, fans have almost become accustomed to being disappointed by the Rumble match itself, and for good reason - at times, it does seem like Vince and his cronies have went out of their way to p*ss us off.
With the 2020 Royal Rumble on the horizon and the dawn of a new decade just passed, there's no better time to look back on the last ten years' Rumble matches. Brace yourself for some overwhelmingly stupid decisions, some bafflingly uninspired winners and an, admittedly small, dash of brilliance.
10. 2015
Heading into this match, there were many young stars that the WWE universe was dying to see main event WrestleMania. For the first time in a long time, WWE had loads of surprise winners that they could have gone with, and the fans would still have been happy. It should have, could have and would have been an all-time great, yet we look back on it with disgust, and for good reason.
It's almost as if WWE searched for every way to make the fans cheer, and did the exact opposite. In Philadelphia of all places! We were all excited to see Daniel Bryan finally win a Rumble match, and they eliminated him in ten minutes. We were hoping for a white-hot Dolph Ziggler to make an impact, and after his monstrous pop at #30, he was eliminated in two minutes.
The amount of people that WWE could have chosen to grant the victory to was insane - Dolph Ziggler, Iron Man Bray Wyatt, Daniel Bryan, Wade Barrett and especially Dean Ambrose all left the fans yearning for a winner other than Roman Reigns. Obviously, Roman Reigns won.
Despite WWE's efforts to make Reigns look like a heroic underdog, the Philly crowd refused to accept his coronation and he was brutally booed. The boos continued to rain down even as The Rock made a return to beat off the bad guys and raise his cousin Roman's hand.
While the show as a whole was somewhat salvaged by the stellar world title match, the main event left a bad taste in people's mouths for a long time after.