Who REALLY Carried WWE Every Year (1985-2026)

You don't need the top titles to be that year's WWE MVP, but they sure help.

Like Vince McMahon, Triple H has his firm favourites. Pushing fresh faces and creating new stars/main eventers will always be a concern for the company, but every promoter has a core group of 'old reliables' that they can lean on in times of need. Want to pop a rating? Give Roman Reigns a call. Need to shift some more tickets? John Cena is all ears.

A fair few folks will shake their heads at some of the picks for select years within, but there's context behind every single one of them. Don't agree? That's fine, but just know you've henceforth been challenged to a steel cage match at the Garden, brother. Speaking of brothers brothering, we'll be stretching all the way back to the halcyon days of the mid-1980s.

WrestleMania was a new fangled thing, Hulkamania was running wild, and McMahon was putting the full might of his marketing machine behind the poster boy. In that sense, things have changed. Today, WWE's spotlight is more evenly split, and opportunities better distributed. That made choosing exactly who carried the can in more recent years more of a challenge.

Some not so subtle shocks have dive-bombed into the mix to spice things up. Again though, there are valid reasons for their inclusions. Shock value alone wouldn't have been enough to justify it.

Need to know who carried WWE through golden periods and lean years alike? You got it. Tuck in.

Say hello to the biggest star in the biz throughout the 1980s. Ric Flair was deemed the best worker, but he wasn't a bigger star than Hulk Hogan. Anyone on the NWA side claiming that was frankly full of it and blinded by match quality over sheer mass appeal. Vince McMahon hitched his wagon to Hulk for a reason.

The fledgling WrestleMania brand owed a ton to celebrity and the mainstream coverage which came with the likes of Muhammad Ali, Cyndi Lauper and others, but the wrestling side of things needed Hogan's influence. He teamed with Mr. T vs. Roddy Piper and Paul Orndorff in a heated main event tag bout that reflected the coming slogan: "The WWF - What The Wooooooooorld Is Watching".

God bless 'Mean' Gene Okerlund's voiceover.

It really wouldn't have mattered had Vince gone with someone better bell to bell than Hulk as WWF Champion. He would've been viewed as the main man in the promotion anyway. This was not a case of the belt making the man. In fact, it was the other way around. That top WWF prize meant more around Hogan's waist than it had around Bob Backlund's. Technical acumen, be damned!

Nobody will be stunned to see the Hulkster dominate these early spots. His charisma was unmatched (those hyped up promos were something else), and he knew how to maximise his skills inside the ring too. Don't get it twisted: Hogan wasn't a shoddy worker. He wasn't Flair, but he wasn't exactly crap either.