Ranking EVERY WWE Royal Rumble Pay-Per-View From Worst To Best
The highs and lows from 'The Road To WrestleMania's' first significant stop...
There have been some good, bad and f*cking ugly Royal Rumbles over the years, but that's not the only reason why the cliched categories have been employed here when assessing every single edition of the company's 'January Classic'.
The Royal Rumble is a pay-per-view unlike any other, in that it promises virtually not only an entire roster appearing in something significant, but an advertised main event almost guaranteed to go over an hour. This seems less of a creative flex in the era of Network specials and dollars-per-minute viewbait, but the stipulation suffered so much in the middle of the 2010s that the match engineered to generate reactions briefly became a graveyard for pops.
The company aren't quite out of the woods yet - Shinsuke Nakamura and Asuka won 2018's editions but suffered for their art for the rest of the year - but the Rumble's prestige is all but resorted ahead of the Road to WrestleMania 35. What then, of those that came before the darkest days? Or those that shone as lights at the end of creative and commercial tunnels? WWE have done a grand job of getting the fanbase to bolster the Rumble as a banker, even if it's occasionally been a bit of a ripoff...
32. Greatest Royal Rumble
The Good: John Cena and Triple H's contemporary take on an old Hulk Hogan/Ultimate Warrior classic was predictably well-recieved by the wrestling-starved crowd. Daniel Bryan's 76:05 stint in the 50-man main event was a Rumble record, but the rest of the contest committed very little else to memory other than the subversively cathartic sight of Titus O'Neil falling flat on his face.
The Bad: Almost all of the undercard was pitiful filler. The Undertaker tarnished his legacy further with an extended squash of Rusev, Roman Reigns and Brock Lesnar sh*t things up in a cage, AJ Styles and Shinsuke Nakamura disappointed again, whilst Jinder Mahal's match with Jeff Hardy contained one of the most embarrassing botches of the year from the 'Modern Day Maharaja'.
The Ugly: The mere existence of the event made the whole experience rather unpleasant, with WWE's women's roster unable to work the event whatsoever, despite Michael Cole's forced platitudes about the changing attitudes of a nation. WWE's deal with Saudi Arabia tiptoed towards even murkier territory later that year.