The WORST Wrestling Story Every Year (1989-2025)
Before WWE was cinema, it was dollar bin trash.
WWE and AEW are in a strange, unfamiliar place in 2025.
Wrestling fans tend to classify periods of time in the business as “eras”. What is this era called? Is ‘Bland Competence’ a fitting descriptor?
For decades, millennial-aged wrestling fans have known only one reality: the two most prominent wrestling organisations in the U.S. cannot be good or hot at the same time. Since the territories died, there has been one rule-proving exception to this strange phenomenon: the competitive brilliance between the WWF and WCW across 1997. Otherwise, one of two things happens:
Both majors are bad at the same time - which, between WWE and TNA, was true for virtually all of the 2000s.
Or, one promotion does a great job of servicing its base, and the other doesn’t. AEW annihilated WWE creatively between 2019 and 2021; across 2023 and 2024, a resurgent WWE, led by Paul ‘Triple H’ Levesque, reenergised its fanbase at the precise same time Tony Khan’s dismal experiments with sports entertainment and poor mismanagement of the CM Punk drama tanked interest and belief in his product.
This has changed in 2025. Two competent students of the game are running the respective majors. Neither is quite in peak form. Triple H has failed to craft a storyline as intriguing as the Bloodline saga, and is becoming lazy with his TV formats. Tony Khan meanwhile continues to place far too much emphasis on match quality ahead of emotionally-charged stories. And yet, at time of writing, neither fanbase seems too upset by the impromptu match versus All-Star 8-Man tags we’re calling a wrestling war.
As uninspiring and patterned as too much of mainstream U.S. output is, be grateful. Wrestling was arguably more interesting in times gone by.
It was inarguably worse…
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