WWE Announces 2025 King & Queen Of The Ring Tournaments; Brackets Have A Twist (WWE News)
Triple H has decided to mix things up for King & Queen Of The Ring this year.
Both Raw GM Adam Pearce and SmackDown counterpart Nick Aldis announced on Friday's episode of blue brand TV that the next WWE King & Queen Of The Ring tournaments will kick off next week. There are obviously separate tourneys for the men and women across both major shows.
Like last year, both sets of brackets will kick off with 16 wrestlers apiece, but there's a twist for 2025's versions: The opening round matches will be Fatal-4-Way bouts. So, in other words, there are actually only 3 rounds to each tournament this time. A first round, the semi finals, and then the respective finals.
They'll take place at Night Of Champions over in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on 28 June. The close proximity of that show explains why WWE plumped for an opening round change. Management presumably didn't want to run qualifiers at the same time Money In The Bank ones either, so WWE will need to race through each King & Queen Of The Ring tournament quickly.
Logically, a couple of first round matches (one for the men and one for the women) will take place on Monday's Raw and then a further pair on Friday's SmackDown. Then, the company will repeat that trick on the 16 and 20 June editions of both shows. That'd leave just enough time to run the semi finals on the 23 June Raw and 27 June SmackDown.
As an add on to that, the 'go home' edition of SmackDown will likely be pre-taped due to travel. So, anyone seeking spoilers will surely know both finals by the time the 23 June Raw wraps up.
Winners Of Both Tourneys Will Get SummerSlam Title Matches
Pearce and Aldis also revealed that the 2025 King & Queen Of The Ring winners will go on to work major title matches at SummerSlam on 2-3 August. Of course, those who recall last year's supershow will remember that 'King' Gunther beat Damian Priest for the World Heavyweight Title and 'Queen' Nia Jax dethroned Bayley to become the brand new Women's Champ.
Something similar could happen again this time with fresh faces.
Interestingly, WWE instructed both GMs to act like they were "raising the stakes" and offering something radically different for 2025's tourneys. That isn't actually the case. The only notable change is to the formatting and inclusion of those aforementioned Fatal-4-Ways in the opening round. Everything else (including SummerSlam's title shots) is pretty much identical to 2024.
Again, both tournaments will jumpstart on the 9 June episode of flagship show Raw.