The WORST Wrestling Story Every Year (1989-2025)

2018 - Natalya Vs. The Riott Squad

2018 was an abysmal year of WWE programming.

Tony Khan must have been giddy at the prospect of launching All Elite Wrestling. WWE spewed forth deranged nonsense every single week, turning off an untold number of fans in the process.

WWE botched the much-anticipated feud with the Miz so badly that Daniel Bryan turned heel in under a year; they deliberately broke up Rusev and Aiden English because they didn’t get people might like them; Sami Zayn attempted to mock Bobby Lashley by dressing up three indie extras as his sisters.

Intentionally counterproductive, utterly puerile, and drastically incompetent: the WWE of 2018 was the reason AEW was able to exist. WWE in 2018 was so powerfully awful that the McMahons had to apologise for how sh*tty it was on live television.

The Miz Vs. Daniel Bryan was probably the worst of the lot, in that it was irrefutable evidence that WWE had lost it. The promotion had failed to write the story that wrote itself.

But, then again, in the programme between Natalya and the Riott Squad, Ruby Riott in October broke a pair of sunglasses that purportedly belonged to Jim ‘The Anvil’ Neidhart: Natalya’s father, who had passed away in August. Later in the story, ahead of the TLC pay-per-view, an image of Jim ‘The Table’ Neidhart was printed, cut out, and glued onto your favourite weapon.

This was cheap heat, too absurd and funny not to laugh at - a disgrace to the bloke’s memory and a wildly ineffective attempt at generating sympathy on behalf of Natalya.