Horrible / WWE - Gooker Award Winners

WWE is, by far, the biggest pro wrestling company in the world... and also the most concurrent winner of WrestleCrap's Gooker Award. Hell, they are named after one of the company's most infamous bombs! Here are the winners!

Important Notes

• If something bad was an isolated incident or simply stupid, it doesn't make the whole thing Horrible. Merely being offensive in its subject matter is not enough to justify a work as So Bad It's Horrible. Hard as it is to imagine at times, there is a market for all types of deviancy (no matter how small a niche it is). It has to fail to appeal even to that niche to qualify as this.
• No Real Life Examples, Please! While WWE's management of the COVID-19 Pandemic has been deemed questionable at best, it doesn't count as an example, as it doesn't pertain to anything Kayfabe but rather a Real Life situation. It also disqualifies Vince McMahon's distasteful "brass rings" comment, which was a half of the 2014 winner entries.

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The InVasion Angle (2001)

Ah, The InVasion Angle - the greatest feud there ever could have been, and the biggest disappointment there ever was.

• By April 2001, the then-WWF had bought both of its major competitors - World Championship Wrestling and Extreme Championship Wrestling - after both companies had gone out of business. The WCW buyout was the major acquisition, with the WWF acquiring the company's assets (including many of the contracts of its remaining roster and its extensive video library); they went so far as to have a special Nitro/Raw simulcast segment after the last match on the final Nitro to announce that Shane McMahon had (kayfabe) bought WCW instead of his father Vince (which, itself, was where the problems started)^note A lot of people think of this as the moment that killed wrestling entirely, and while that's obviously an exaggeration (WWE still exists) one thing that definitely is true is that ratings and attendance have been plummeting ever since. Despite WWE's record profits thanks to their insane TV deal less people are watching wrestling now, on TV or in person, than at any other point in history and those numbers are still freefalling. So yeah, botching this angle (and WCW botching their entire company) might have had some negative long term effects.
• WCW vs. WWF was a dream match that fans looked forward to, but it quickly turned sour in the weeks leading up to the InVasion PPV. ECW wrestlers invaded an episode of Raw, and Paul Heyman himself declared the WWF vs. WCW war would be "taken to the extreme". This was the absolute high point of the storyline, as it appeared the top three wrestling promotions of the Attitude Era would be duking it out with each other in a no-holds-barred winner-take-all big battle... and then it all went downhill. At the end of that night, ECW joined with WCW and became a singular entity known as The Alliance. The group would be called "the Alliance" through the rest of the storyline; mentions of ECW and WCW were kept to a minimum, partly because of trademark issues with usage of the ECW name. To top it off, Stephanie McMahon had been announced as the new owner of ECW, thus making the feud Shane and Steph vs. Vince, with the wrestlers as pawns in their family squabble. After having the Austin/McMahon feud appear to end because of the main event at WrestleMania X7, Vince threw himself and his family into the spotlight again, overshadowing everyone else and infuriating a lot of fans.
• The very first time the WWF tried to promote a WCW match counted as this all on its own, for a whole bunch of reasons - some of which weren't even anyone's fault. The match was Booker T vs. Buff Bagwell in front of a very hostile Tacoma, Washington crowd. The crowd had been booing and heckling the wrestlers all night, and many of them walked out before the WCW match even started. Booker and Bagwell didn't help, putting on a truly awful match (most of the blame went to Bagwell, who didn't exactly have a reputation for being a stellar worker to begin with, and who was in exceptionally poor form that night - Bagwell later blamed his performance on nerves from the hostile fans, though). The only thing that got cheers during the match was when "Stone Cold" Steve Austin and Kurt Angle, the WWF's top heels at the time, came out to beat up Booker and Bagwell before tossing them out of the arena. From this show, Vince took the belief that fans wouldn't cheer any WCW wrestlers and that WCW wrestlers didn't know how to work anyway. To put this in metaphor, the InVasion got off on the wrong step. This show was the wrong step, and WWE has rarely been back to Tacoma since. Bagwell was legitimately fired because the match was that horrible. Its induction into the annals of the WrestleCrap archives didn't come until 15 years after the initial taping because RD Reynolds was so infuriated by it that "he never wanted to relive it."
• The next problem with the InVasion was the lack of star power on the part of WCW. Many top-tier WCW stars were not acquired by the WWF because their contracts were supposedly too expensive to buy out, the most notable amongst these names being Ric Flair, Sting, Goldberg, Scott Steiner and (most damning of all), the entire original nWo (Hulk Hogan, Scott Hall and Kevin Nash). This meant that the two biggest names on the WCW side at the beginning of the angle were Booker T and Diamond Dallas Page. This, of course, prevented many of the most anticipated WCW vs. WWF matches from happening. Instead, in a combination of trying to put higher drawing wrestlers in the main event and an unwillingness to treat WCW (and later ECW) like they were actually on par with WWF, Vince had both Austin and Angle turn turncoat and join the Alliance. The only Alliance members who were allowed to look halfway decent against the WWF guys were those who had already been working in WWF previously - The Dudley Boyz and Rhyno, for example. In other words, the feud, for the most part, was very blatantly WWF vs. WWF. Most of the WCW and ECW guys were kept in the background and those that weren't were treated rather horribly, bar Rob Van Dam. Vince responded by booking Van Dam against WWF heels as often as possible.
• Diamond Dallas Page's treatment during the InVasion deserves its own explanation. DDP was so eager to continue his career, as well as be a major player in the InVasion, that he accepted a buyout for his WCW contract to the tune of 50 cents on the dollar. He was brought in as the stalker of The Undertaker's then-wife at the time Sara, and then he and fellow WCW refugee Chris Kanyon feuded with Undertaker and Kane - and they were absolutely buried; the average match resembled a Curb-Stomp Battle, and the feud ended with Page getting pinned by Sara from within a Raw match after SummerSlam 2001. He was reduced to a lower midcarder with a motivational-speaker gimmick, and had only just started getting over again when he was severely concussed in a match with Hardcore Holly, essentially ending his wrestling career (aside from a brief run with TNA). The Undertaker's lack of interest in the entire angle certainly didn't help anything — he went out of his way to make Page look bad. As the next entry also suggests, 'Taker the consummate WWF company man appeared to have taken the Monday Night Wars more personally than he should have and was simply unwilling to work properly with ex-WCW guys, possibly the single most unprofessional thing the Deadman ever did in his otherwise legendary career, which may have played a hand at being named Most Overrated that year by the The Wrestling Observer Newsletter awards.
• Unforgiven 2001 featured an infamous match between the Brothers of Destruction (Undertaker and Kane) and Kronik (Brian Adams and Bryan Clarke). Taker was no-selling everything any WCW guy did to him with impunity, and Kane was only slightly better; meanwhile, told they were losing, Kronik decided they just wouldn't try very hard in the match. Botches, no-selling, extended rest-holds, miscommunication between the wrestlers, everything that could go wrong did. Both members of Kronik were ordered to go to development after the match, but refused and lost their jobs.
• Then, finally, there was Survivor Series 2001. The final match was a "Winner Take All" Survivor Series Match between the Alliance and the WWF where the loser of the match would be forced to withdraw from the wrestling business (which should have told you who was winning right from the start). The match put Team WWF (Big Show, Chris Jericho ^note {both WCW alumni!}, The Undertaker^note Technically also WCW alumni as Mean Mark Callous for about 9 months in 1990), Kane^note Was never actually under contract to WCW but passed through there as a jobber named Brusier Mastino (as shown here getting squashed by Sting) before catching on with the WWF, and The Rock) against Team Alliance ("Stone Cold" Steve Austin, Kurt Angle ^note {who had only ever wrestled for the WWF}, Booker T, Rob Van Dam, and Shane McMahon ^note {yes, that's right: Shane McMahon was one of the men tasked with wrestling on behalf of the Alliance's existence, and he didn't have a non-wrestler counterpart on the WWF side, making the outcome all the more blatant}). Of the ten men in the match, only two had been in the Alliance's originating companies when they went out of business (Booker T in WCW and Rob Van Dam in ECW), essentially making the main event an all-WWF affair. This becomes even more blatant given that the final two men in the match were Steve Austin and The Rock. That's right, the fate of the wrestling world didn't hinge on a WCW star vs. a WWF star or an ECW star vs. a WWF star - it hinged on the two biggest WWF stars of the Attitude Era. And Rock won thanks to Angle nailing Austin with the title belt and betraying the Alliance!
• After the InVasion ended, all the WCW main eventers who had been supposedly too expensive to bring over were hired over the years, with Ric Flair showing up the very night after the InVasion ended. Over the years, every WCW main eventer would end up in WWE, with Sting eventually being the last; though he was invited several times in the interim, he didn't trust WWE creative to treat him well and declined to hop onboard until 2014. In a shoot interview, Sting admitted that the reason he thought this was because of seeing how WWE treated Booker T during the InVasion angle. InVasion was so bad, it ruined even the future possibility of the dream match of Sting vs. Undertaker; Sting retired in 2016 (unretiring in 2020 to work for All Elite Wrestling) and the Undertaker retired in 2020.
  • Incidentally, it turned out that Sting was 100% correct in his assumptions, as when he finally did debut in WWE it was just so the company could drag out WCW's corpse to piss on it one more time - during his WrestleMania 31 match against Triple H, the commentators constantly harped on Sting for being a "WCW interloper" out to ruin the company for them when during the feud Sting had pointedly gone out of his way to deny this - in fact, his reason for opposing The Authority was because he didn't want to see their backstage politics ruin WWE the same way WCW had gone and then he lost the damn match anyway!
• The InVasion, aside from winning the 2001 Gooker Award, was the recipient of two more WrestleCrap inductions: the aforementioned Booker T vs. Buff Bagwell match; and the aftermath, in which Eric Bischoff hugged Vince McMahon on WWE programming like the six years of animosity before them had never even happened.

The Katie Vick Saga (2002)

Murder, necrophilia, ventriloquism, this saga that accompanied the title unification match between Kane and Triple H had it all! It all started when H brought up a mysterious woman named 'Katie Vick', which upset Kane. It was soon revealed that she was Kane's dead high school sweetheart, whom he killed in a car accident. A distasteful subject, but nothing too offensive... until a promo where Triple H, disguised as Kane, entered the funeral parlor where Katie's body was on display, climbed into the casket, and had sex with the corpse. The scene climaxed with a nude "Kane" throwing gray matter at the camera, yelling "I finally did it! I screwed your brains out!" This was shot in an actual funeral parlor, with an actual funeral taking place in the next room—the funeral director had to come in and interrupt because Triple H was making too much noise. This angle was also meant to introduce Scott "Sick Boy" Vick—hence the surname; she was to be his sister—and instead, it tanked his career. Vick was seen at the time as an underrated wrestler with a big upside, but when the angle failed, WWE lost interest in him. He wound up retiring over this. One wouldn't be surprised if this was meant to kill Kane's career too, in light of such missteps as May 19, 2006, Lita's pregnancy, and the Fake Diesel, Isaac Yankem, and Christmas Creature gimmicks.

• Vince McMahon was the only person who found the angle amusing, despite the efforts of absolutely everyone. For years afterward, the skit was castigated by such folks as Triple H, Mick Foley, The Rock, Shawn Michaels, CM Punk, even Kane himself, and it is universally considered by fans to be one of the most embarrassing moments in professional wrestling.

"Eddiesploitation" (2006)

Vince McMahon's "tribute" to the late Eddie Guerrero, a tasteless and disrespectful angle that lasted for over a year starting from 2006, and involved every superstar connected to Latino Heat just for the sake of ratings. Everyone from Eddie's best friends to his still-grieving widow was forced to take part in feud after feud, fight after fight, and promo after promo referencing him and his death. Even Rey Mysterio's world title push revolved around Eddie—he was suggested to be receiving spiritual assistance from Eddie's spirit in Heaven, which led to such memorable moments as Randy Orton's "Eddie’s down there, in Hell." Only one thing kept it from dragging on even longer: Chris Benoit finally calling Vince out, after he tried to set up a feud between Benoit and Chavo Guerrero over Eddie's "estate."According to Konnan, McMahon himself was the only person in the company who liked this idea. When WrestleCrap awarded it the Gooker for 2006, RD Reynolds didn't include any soundbites, images or jokes—it was too godawful to go through it again, never mind joke about.

Reynolds: On the marquee of this site, it says, "The Very Worst of Professional Wrestling". Truly, this induction is the very embodiment of that tagline. The seemingly never-ending exploitation of the late, great Eddie Guerrero is the absolute worst of pro wrestling, bar none.

In fact, it wasn't believed at first, not even by wrestling pundits, that Eddie was actually dead; many expected him to just pop up at WrestleMania and help his good friend Rey Mysterio win the World Title. Vince evidently learned nothing, as in 2018, he tried to get heat off of Roman Reigns' legit leukemia diagnosis. Dean Ambrose's Face–Heel Turn was all about this, including telling Roman "to respond to the man upstairs." Supposedly, one promo would've lost WWE all business with cancer-related organizations and required them to fire Dean and the writers to save face, had he not refused to cut it—this was among the reasons he left WWE. The only good thing to come out of it was Vickie Guerrero's spokesperson/manager career, which carried her all the way to AEW.

Michael Cole's Heel Turn (2011)

It actually started in 2010, when Michael Cole was in NXT. There, he developed three of the run's defining traits: an affinity for The Miz, a hatred for Daniel Bryan, and the urge to bury everything and everyone, demonstrated no better than when he loudly took a phone call during a poor showing between Kaitlyn and Maxine. But 2011 was when he brought this act to Raw and SmackDown — and started putting down all of the top guys, including fellow announcers, in favor of himself. He became the offficial spokesman of the Anonymous Raw General Manager, and a mouthpiece for Vince McMahon's inexplicable hatred for Jim Ross. He feuded with both Ross and Jerry Lawler, culminating in some of the absolute worst moments in WWE history: his feud with Lawler included mocking his (then very recently) deceased mother and bringing out Brian Christopher (to no reaction at all) to insult his father, a WrestleMania match in which Cole gave an absolutely wretched performance while Lawler's victory was overturned by the Anonymous General Manager himself, and a shorter match on Raw that nevertheless ended the exact same way. Meanwhile, Ross was subjected to a Humiliation Conga which included the "Country Whipping" match at Extreme Rules, a Kiss My Foot match that Cole lost, to no real effect, the "Michael Cole Challenge", where Ross could only keep his job if he beat Cole in an arm wrestle, a dance-off, and a weigh-in (which, to make matters worse, he lost), and a rap battle which Ross called "worst segment of TV ever". This run would continue into 2012, as he buried every the pushe of every babyface and made the show about himself—only when Lawler had a legit heart attack at the desk, on September 2012, did the run end for good.

WrestleMania 32 (2016)

What should have been a fitting climax for WWE's Reality Era instead became a typecast in how not to book a pay-per-view or the night straight after.

• From the get-go, the WWE had a major injury crisis in the months leading up to the show, with Seth Rollins, John Cena, and Randy Orton all on the shelf and Sting and Daniel Bryan forced into temporary retirement. As a result, several planned matches (including, reportedly, the long-awaited Cena–Undertaker feud^note Cena would eventually get his Mania match against the Deadman two years later, in a squash match dictated by Taker's body slowly calling time on his career.) had to be scrapped. It got so bad that when Roman Reigns had to miss a couple of weeks to fix a deviated septum, Dean Ambrose was the only full-time main-event talent left and he had to juggle four feuds^note the IC title feud with Kevin Owens, the WWEHC feud with Triple H, and the street fight feud with Brock Lesnar, and his and Roman's feud with the League of Nations just to keep the engine running in the build-up.
• It's said the opening match sets the tone for the rest of the show. Well, the kickoff for this event was Kalisto vs. Ryback, a poor booking that ended even worse when the face Kalisto yanked off a turnbuckle cover in full view of the ref, and Ryback ran headfirst into it. Then came the 10-women Team Total Divas^note Alicia Fox, Brie Bella, Eva Marie, Natalya & Paige vs. Team B.A.D. & Blonde^note Team B.A.D. (Naomi and Tamina), Emma, Lana and Summer Rae, featuring the in-ring debut of Lana...whose only offense was two decent-looking kicks and some awfully-executed punches, after which every star in the match went into full-finisher routine, ending with Brie submitting Naomi. Last was The Usos vs. The Dudley Boys—what should have been an awesome match was just a filler with the Usos splashing the Dudleys through tables. To make matters worse, AT&T Stadium was completely empty until it was over.^note The stadium's internet went completely down, preventing many from entering due to being unable to get their ticket infomation, resulting in the venue being empty till the Intercontintal Championship match.
• The event was filled with fan-favorite burials: AJ Styles was defeated by Chris Jericho, The New Day was defeated by the League of Nations^note Sheamus, Wade Barrett, Rusev and Alberto Del Rio, led by The Authority's protege Sheamus (and then "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, Shawn Michaels, and Mick Foley beat up all 7 guys), Dean Ambrose was buried by a Brock Lesnar whose 2012 steam was already behind him and whose years of overprotection were approaching fast, Creator's Pet Charlotte Flair won the brand-new Women's Championship in a Triple Threat, a still-out-of-scrappydom Shane McMahon was defeated by The Undertaker, and Baron Corbin won the Andre The Giant Memorial Battle Royal. In addition, the event came off the heels of the atrocious, protracted, money-losing Authority storyline, and several of the burials were connected in some way. And, as such, the angle and the event ended up Triple H vs. a full-on scrappy Roman Reigns, which ended in half an hour with Reigns winning the match.
• The show was also padded out in the extreme, featuring everything from the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders to a Squash Match from The Rock against Erick Rowan, which started with Dwayne setting his name on fire and ended up with John Cena saving The Rock from a beatdown from The Wyatt Family. It was to the point that the main event segment didn't even begin until the show was already 10 minutes overtime, and then they gave both Triple H and Reigns long, elaborate entrances before a match that went on for another 27 minutes. All of this resulted in an event six hours long, with very few good matches to show for it, in the short term or the long run.
• The aftermath saw most the show's outcomes being swept under the rug:
  • While Zack Ryder managed to win his match, he lost the IC belt to The Miz the day after.
  • While Styles lost his match, the next night he became No. 1 contender.
  • While the LON won their match, they kicked out Barrett and disbanded soon after. ^note The former was due to Barrett's contract expiring and him agreeing not to renew it. Meanwhile, they would have been destroyed after a feud with The Wyatt Family, but this had to be scrapped after Bray Wyatt got injured, leading to them disbanding without the feud.
  • While Ambrose lost his match against Lesnar, he managed to become WWE Champion two months later.
  • While Corbin won the ATGMBR trophy, he did nothing of note related to his win.
  • While Shane lost the match, he still got to become the General Manager of Raw and Smackdown until the Brand Split.
  • While The Authority was at long last no more, all the damage they did stood there, and Reigns's popularity was at an all-time low.

Jinder Mahal as WWE Champion (2017)

In 2017, WWE decided to give the WWE Championship to Jinder Mahal. The end result was a total disgrace to the company that completely derailed Jinder's career and tarnished the once-proud championship.

• During his first run with the company, Jinder was a lower-midcarder at best, and ended his tenure being released while part of 3MB, who, despite being over, existed just to job. When he was rehired in 2016 to fill out the roster following the second Brand Extension, he resumed his WWE tenure doing just that. On the 2017 Superstar Shake-up, he was sent to SmackDown, where the story begins:
• In the blue brand, no less than two weeks removed from being embarrassed at WrestleMania 33 by football player Rob Gronkowski, and with an abysmal record of 75 wins and 344 losses, he was entered as a seeming extra body in a #1 Contender's match for Randy Orton's WWE Championship. He shocked the world by winning, then beating Orton for the title at Backlash 2017. Speculation soon arose that he had been given the belt to promote WWE's forthcoming tour of India, which made business sense—it's one of the largest and fastest-growing countries in the world, and a perfect place for wrestling to make inroads. The problem was that Mahal wasn't a very good choice to promote the company. For one, he wasn't born in India.^note He is an Indian Punjabi Sikh, but he was born and raised in Canada, and hadn’t even been to India prior to the push. For two, his in-ring ability was So Okay, It's Average at best and on par with anything else listed here at worst, and hadn't really improved since he left the first time.^note (About the only pops he got during his matches were from his lackeys the Singhs — the former Bollywood Boyz — constantly running interference and bumping like madmen. This also ended up being the way Jinder almost always won his matches; having the brothers distract his opponent while he recovered and hit him with his finisher afterwards, which not only became predictable, but also made him look weak) For three, his character was just boring, a dead-straight stock Foreign Wrestling Heel that would've been out of date more than twenty years prior. And WWE was promoting being a "hero" to the people of India- all these factors combined to make it so that no one in any country, let alone India, cared about him. But, as if the plans to promote the tour weren’t any more blatant, the Hindi commentary team shilled Mahal in all of his matches, promoting him as if he were the greatest wrestler of all time.
• From there, his title reign went on to defy all understanding of how credible champions were booked. "Highlights" include defending the title against Randy Orton in a Punjabi Prison Match^note rated as one of the worst gimmick matches of all time—the only other match they brought it back for was with The Great Khali that same night, who also was responsible for helping Jinder win his match to audible boos at Battleground 2017, an attempted cash in by Baron Corbin during a match with John Cena that was thwarted by a roll-up, damaging the images of all three wrestlers involved, and a feud with Shinsuke Nakamura that nearly destroyed the latter's already shaky career in the main roster.^note and also featured some of the most racist promos aired on WWE television since The Nation of Domination, famously met with cries of "THAT'S TOO FAR!" from the crowd) After enduring months of backlash from both fans and talent alike WWE ultimately had AJ Styles defeat Jinder on a random episode of SmackDown. To show how pathetic Jinder’s winning tactic was, Styles thwarted the typical finish of Singh interference… By simply putting his foot on the rope when Jinder pinned him to break the pin, causing Jinder’s entire plan to fall apart.
• The consequences of the run were devastating:
  • WWE had to cancel every show but one on their India tour due to low ticket sales—Jinder hadn't even gotten over there, defeating the entire point of the run. It turned out the people of India preferred most of the wrestlers that other countries liked, such as Styles. To give you an idea of how bad the ticket sales were, the previous tour in the same city was a two-night event. On the one show that wasn't canceled, his "homecoming", Jinder faced off against Triple H, and jobbed to him in front of a 70% filled arena. That's right, the push was such a failure that they couldn't even let him win in his supposed homeland.
  • The whole run torpedoed the WWE Championship's lineage and prestige, so much so that on dual-branded pay-per-views, its matches were secondary to the then-very-recent Universal Championship.
  • After this run, Jinder did win at least two other titles but aside from the obligatory rematch with Styles, which he lost, Jinder was kept far away from the WWE Championship, never to sully its legacy again. However in January 2024, whether due to Aesop Amnesia or because it's someone's idea of a joke, Jinder was booked into in a match with Seth Rollins... for the World Heavyweight Championship to help kill time until that year's Royal Rumble. Jinder was soundly defeated and wouldn't appear on television again until the André the Giant memorial battle royal the night before WrestleMania XL, later being suddenly but inevitably released in April 2024.
• This disastrous title run won WrestleCrap's 2017 Gooker Award. Fun fact: The Randy Orton vs. Bray Wyatt "House of Horrors" match at Payback was awarded the title by default earlier that year; the hosts assumed no decision WWE could possibly make since might ever be as bad.
• Meanwhile, The Wrestling Observer Newsletter was clear on its judgement of Jinder: not only did he won the "Most Overrated" award (by a landslide margin even against Roman Reigns), but he got second and fourth place in "Most Disgusting Promotional Tactic", the former for his racist promos against Nakamura and the latter for the title reign as a whole — and he likely would have won had the two been combined into one entry — he lost only to WWE re-personing Jimmy Snuka after having been Unpersoned due to the investigation of the death of his ex-girlfriend.
• As a side note, WWE didn't give up on promoting in India, but it's perhaps telling that, near the end of Mahal's reign, they signed three new Indian wrestlers: Rinku Singh (former pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates and subject of Million Dollar Arm), Saurav Gurjar, and Amanpreet Singh, all of whom were born in India.^note And that's not counting Kishan Raftar and Jeet Rama, who were signed well before Mahal even returned It took three more years for Singh and Gurjar to debut on NXT television, and by that time WWE had stopped mentioning India entirely.
• As bad as the run was, it could have been even worse. There were reports that Jinder was due to hold the title until WrestleMania 34, where he would have dropped it to Cena, and judging by the way he was booked, it would have damaged the title’s legacy even more. It was only due to a scathing Pretender Diss promo from Paul Heyman just before Jinder was due to wrestle Brock Lesnar in a Champion vs. Champion match at Survivor Series 2017 (as well as Brock outright refusing to work with Jinder, knowing that it would not draw) that got the creative department to abort the run.

Crown Jewel (2018)

Considered one of the worst pay-per-views in WWE history, the inaugural Crown Jewel event proved to be a disaster in both booking and business decisions. This was a train wreck from start to finish, but with the shady offer they accepted, they couldn't not run it.

• The year before was alright, nevermind the WWE entering a ten-year, twenty event, billion-dollar contract with the Saudi Arabian government. Many questioned why they would air an event women weren't legally allowed to perform in despite their mounting attempts to push female talent stateside, but that was the worst of it.
  But on the year of, their relationship with the government (and Mohammed bin Salman in particular) went from eyebrow-raising to a public relations poisoning that had personalities the world over begging WWE to break contract. The only concession WWE made was to prohibit all mention of Saudi Arabia during the special.
• The event became notorious for a lot of curious omissions:
  • John Cena stepped down from competing in the WWE World Cup, as his agent was worried that it could hurt his image; he instead focused on his acting career, leaving recently-turned heel Bobby Lashley to take his place. This was a net gain.
  • Daniel Bryan outright refused to participate, being highly critical of the Saudi Kingdom's abuse of and crimes against LGBTQ+ people. He even offered to lose his WWE Championship shot to The Miz at Super Show-Down, if it meant avoiding Crown Jewel.
    AJ Styles was meant to defend the title against him, culminating their feud and Styles' own with Samoa Joe; but the whole thing was quickly resolved on the SmackDown go-home show three days before, leaving Styles to face Joe at Crown Jewel with no feud in-between. Ironically, Styles vs. Joe became the best match both men had all year, and one of the few good points.
  • Roman Reigns announced that he had to drop the Universal Title due to a recurring battle with leukemia. This forced WWE to make the three-way between him, Braun Strowman, and Brock Lesnar a one-on-one for the vacant title. ^note Although reports after his February return indicate that he did not want to participate as well, even before his diagnosis. More on that later...
  • Sami Zayn. On paper, he'd be a no-brainer for a show like this; he's Syrian-Canadian, speaks fluent Arabic, and had been one of the faces of the company even while he was in NXT. He even performed on the 2015 Middle East tour. He'd been advertised for Greatest Royal Rumble, but was dropped a few days prior, officially because Bobby Lashley had injured him in a match. Turns out the contract forbade WWE from even speaking his name in particular as part of any Saudi show, for several reasons^note Zayn is Syrian-Canadian, Syria and Saudi Arabia are not on friendly terms (to make a long story short the Saudis are mostly aligned with the U.S. and other NATO countries while Syria has mostly been backed by Russia and China), though whatever problem the Saudis had with Zayn in particular must have been worked out as he's since worked some of the Saudi Arabia shows. This triggered a few other refusals, and others still refused the money, donating their paychecks to charity.
• November 2 came, and how did the event open? With an underwhelming speech from a recently reinstated Hulk Hogan.^note Baffling in and of itself, given how they handled the sex tape incident. This set the tone for the rest of the PPV. As luck would have it the crown prince had a nostalgic streak, and wanted to see the stars he used to watch back in the WWF years. Hogan was among the few specific requests who had not been dead for years.^note Yokozuna and the Ultimate Warrior were among these requests.
• The WWE World Cup. A "World Cup" where the entirety of its participants came from the United States,^note Although Rey Mysterio is commonly associated with Mexico and is of Mexican ancestry, he was born in and is billed from San Diego, California. even though WWE itself has competitors from at least 10 countries on Raw and SmackDown alone. And on NXT, they even have a Saudi Arabian wrestler, Mansoor. The early rounds were composed of 5-8 minute matches where perennial midcarders The Miz and Dolph Ziggler reached the finals... against proven main eventers and world champions. Then, come the finals, Miz couldn't participate due to a kayfabe injury. Instead of being replaced by his last opponent Rey Mysterio, or forfeiting the match, he was replaced by Shane McMahon, who hadn't wrestled at all that day. Naturally, Shane won, to announcements of "Shane is the Best in the World". And the worst part? This wasn't a last-minute switch—it was intended from the get-go, as part of Shane's long-planned Face–Heel Turn.
• Next was the Universal Title match. WWE's efforts to push Roman as the face of the company fell flat when he vacated the title, leaving the match as a one-on-one between Strowman and Lesnar. The sad announcement had the sole benefit of turning Braun face; most felt his heel run was just to feud with Roman. Come Crown Jewel, a lot of people expected Strowman to put a definitive end to Lesnar's Universal Title prospects; he was the only superstar on Raw who could plausibly be the face of the company. It was good and well, the match was going on without hitches... until Baron Corbin hit Strowman with the title, which allowed Lesnar to hit him with F5 after F5, securing the match and the Universal Title. Long story short: Corbin was tasked with bringing the Universal Championship to Raw, and instead conspired to get the title off Raw.
• And then there's the main event, the very first match announced for the PPV: D-Generation X vs the Brothers of Destruction. This would've been a must-see... twenty years prior, during the Attitude Era. Now, all four of them are past their prime and over their physical peak, with their wrestling careers otherwise far behind. Taker and HHH did have a good match at Super Show-Down weeks earlier, but the promos for this match were beyond the level of the match itself. It started with Triple H tearing his pectoral muscle, and from there it delved into a comedic botch fest. Not that it stopped Hunter, as only a chokeslam upon the announcers' desk would put him out of the match. As for Shawn, his ring rust had showed up too much during the match itself. At one point, both Kane and Shawn were setting up a spot from one of the corners, but Shawn forgot that Kane was wearing a wig and threw it. Then there's the botched moonsault, which broke Michaels' nose and forehead. The match mercifully ended with Hunter pedigreeing Kane.^note This match was meant as a tryout for a possible Michaels comeback, with a match against AJ Styles planned for the following WrestleMania. Predictably, those plans were thrown out as soon as this was over: Shawn has said he will never return to the ring, and the match is an Old Shame for all four participants.
• Little changed in the aftermath of the event, and most of those few changes were for the worse:
  • Perhaps the most notable thing was the beginning of a multiple month-spanning angle involving both Shane and The Miz that led to them forming a team and becoming SmackDown Tag Team Champions... for a couple of weeks, reducing the prestige of a title that had very good runs until that point. Meanwhile, fans had to endure the ring announcers constantly calling Shane "The Best in the World" and drawing it out longer each week, which quickly got on their nerves.
  • The SmackDown roster was subjected to an ignominious sweep from Raw at Survivor Series ^note to make things more ludicrous, WWE completely ignored a lone victory SmackDown got on the pre-show of the event, apparently because it was the result of a botch, for the sake of promoting Raw's "sweep", all for the protracted non-starter that was Shane's heel turn. ^note Which eventually happened... on Fastlane 2019 over three months later. Even then, of all the things that happened in the previous months, the sweep seemed to be the one thing ignored when Shane did finally turn heel.
  • WWE's already doubtful ratings plummeted. Baron Corbin wound up taking the fall onscreen for everything bad that happened on Raw due to having played an on-screen authority role at the time, and the McMahons began "taking the power back" in an attempt to scrub everything to do with this from view. And although Corbin's despised reign as Raw’s general manager came to an end, it also cost SmackDown their much more beloved general manager Paige, and resulted in more airtime for the McMahons, in particular Shane.
  • The Universal Title went back to a mostly-absent title, making it even more meaningless, and Strowman was left out of the title picture. Finn Bálor replaced him for Royal Rumble 2019. Lesnar was booked to retain the title at Royal Rumble, and apparently Vince McMahon was concerned about Strowman losing too many times to Lesnar. However, this attempt to protect his image didn't stop him from jobbing to Baron Corbin with interference from Bobby Lashley and Drew McIntyre at Elimination Chamber 2019, so it was meaningless.
  • Probably the only remotely good thing to come out of the event was the state of the WWE Title: it ended up in the hands of Daniel Bryan on the go-home show for Survivor Series 2018, who pulled off a massive heel turn the same day he won it. He began a bizarre yet brilliant run as an eco-friendly Well-Intentioned Extremist, complete with a "100% organic" new design for the title made out of wood and hemp.
  • The United States Championship finally changed hands at the last SmackDown of the year, ending in Rusev's hands... until Royal Rumble 2019, where he lost it at the hands of Nakamura yet again only for him to lose it on the following SmackDown to, of all people, R-Truth!
  • And last, but definitely not least, the plans for the road to WrestleMania 35 that involved HBK and Taker ^note (which included Taker vs. Shawn and Shawn vs. AJ Styles) were all nixed in light of the main event's failures—it was so awful that Shawn swore off ever returning to the ring as a result.
• As expected, when the time came to pick the worst thing that has happened in wrestling in 2018, not only did it run away with WrestleCrap's Gooker Award, but did so in record-breaking fashion: majority of the vote, margin of victory, and the first Gooker to get over 50%. Which also means that not only did it surpass every other candidate of the year,^note including "Shane winning the World Cup" as a separate entry, which came in a distant second in the voting but also made anything from TNA/Impact Wrestling's worst days look good.
  • What's more this event played a key part in the WWE being picked as the worst wrestling promotion of the year by Dave Meltzer himself, breaking an 11-year streak of TNA/Impact Wrestling "winning" that award. The event also swept many of the negative categories: The pay-pew-view was named "worst show" with 638 votes, while the runner up got 239 votes, and the main event won "worst match" with 289 votes to 57 to the runner-up. The whole controversy got the notorious "Most Disgusting Promotional Tactic" award with a whopping 901 votes, while nothing else reaching 100.
• The worst part of all this is that in spite of everything the all-women's Evolution PPV, founded to compensate for the banning of the entire women's roster from this event, ended up being a serious candidate for best PPV of the year (if not overall) while the overpromoted Crown Jewel was a candidate for worst.

Seth Rollins vs. Bray Wyatt, Hell in a Cell (2019)

Two main event matches from early October 2019 (and the build up to one of them) showcased everything wrong with the creative direction WWE was taking after the abysmal ratings of 2018: a lack of faith in building new stars, and nonsensical booking for commercially successful ones, and both matches happened just two days apart. This was one of them, the other being the Kofi Kingston vs. Brock Lesnar match two days earlier, explained at length along with other instances of Lesnar being pushed at the expense of other wrestlers in the "Brock Lesnar burials" folder on the other page.

• The match started out well enough, even with a constant red filter staying on throughout the entire match. However, things went awry when Rollins, supposedly having the upper hand, couldn't pin Wyatt despite having thrown as many objects and finishers as he could on him. Fans started to notice the repetitive pacing and began to boo Rollins as Wyatt continued to No-Sell his moves. Shit started to hit the fan when Rollins, against the wishes of the referee Rod Zapata, decided to strike Wyatt with a sledgehammer to finish him off, forcing Zapata to call for the bell. In a Hell in a Cell match, which normally goes on until one of the wrestlers is pinned or submits. The whole arena melted down in boos and jeers, with chants of "RESTART THE MATCH!", "AEW!" and "BULLSHIT!" reverberating throughout the arena.^note What's worse, the fans still continued booing after the lights came on and everyone was leaving, with fans chanting "REFUND!" as well By the next day, #CancelWWENetwork was once again trending.
• Both wrestlers saw their image take a major beating in the aftermath, with Rollins' heel-like actions during the match causing much of the fans to turn against him. It's no surprise that Rollins didn't show up the next night on Raw, likely to avoid the potentially huge boos he would've gotten.^note Rollins would later admit on "Stone Cold" Steve Austin's Broken Skull Sessions that he was legitimately furious to the point of wanting to strangle Vince over it when he got to the back — it took Tyson Kidd holding him back and a talk with Paul Heyman to calm him down. While The Fiend didn't see his image tarnished as badly as Rollins did, he ended up losing a lot of momentum as he was essentially seen as an indestructible machine that could withstand any finisher thrown at him, making him difficult to book for future matches with anyone. Even before the match, many in the wrestling world felt Wyatt was pushed into the world title too soon (the match was only Wyatt's second match as The Fiend, after he cleanly beat Finn Bálor at SummerSlam 2019) and weren't impressed by the rushed build towards the HIAC match. Many went into the bout with fairly low expectations, but they weren't at all ready for the bungled up finish at the end.
• To add more salt in the wound, the whole no contest/DQ result in a Hell in a Cell main event match? They did the same damn thing last year.^note In a match between Braun Strowman and Roman Reigns, it ended with Brock Lesnar coming down the ramp, ripping the cell door open, and laying waste to both wrestlers, after which the match was ruled a no contest due to neither wrestler being able to continue. Making matters worse is that Mick Foley, one of the toughest men who ever lived, was the match's special guest referee, yet got taken out by Paul Heyman with pepper spray. The only reason people tolerated that mess was because it was used to build a planned Triple Threat match between Braun, Roman and Brock at Crown Jewel...which, as mentioned in that folder, never happened because of Roman's leukemia returning. That match combined with this debacle had the terrible effect of minimizing the significance of one of WWE's most cherished and romanticized gimmick matches they've utilized for 22 years, as not only did it show WWE could change the rules at any time if they feel like protecting their top faces of the company is more important than entertaining the fans, but that the match type can no longer hold up to the strict PG rules the company has implemented since 2008. Many now doubt that future Hell in a Cell matches will ever receive the kind of hype or brutality that defined them in the past in the aftermath of Rollins vs. Wyatt, especially after reports that both Sasha Banks and Wyatt got injured during their respective matches.
• In a perfect demonstration of how everyone watching felt about the finish, Sean Waltman himself, at the WWE live watch along, couldn't help but shoot on how idiotic it was:
  Sean Waltman: Alright, you may not ask me back for another one of these, but how the hell do you get DQ'd in a Hell in a frickin' Cell!?
• To put the final nail in the coffin, Dave Meltzer gave the match –2 stars, and the Wrestling Observer Newsletter later gave it the "Worst Match of the Year" award.
• This disgrace to wrestling even won the 2019 Gooker Award, just barely beating out the abysmal Rusev-Lana-Lashley love triangle arc by nine votes, as well as beating WWE 2K20, their first-ever video game candidate. On a funny little note, they did recognize that they should have known what people were in store for with the match being brought to its viewers by WWE 2K20 itself. To quote directly from the article, "seeing the Gooker winner being sponsored by the second runner up for the award is a whole new rancid territory."
• Fortunately, WWE did not repeat the mistake of having a no-contest finish for a third year in a row at the 2020 Hell in a Cell event, clearly indicating they had finally learned their lesson.^note Notably, during the Roman Reigns vs. Jey Uso match, the ref tries to throw the match out, only for Reigns to toss him out of the ring, as if WWE were doing a bit of Self-Deprecation at their own past failures. Rollins would also later redeem himself in the Cell with his highly-praised match at Crown Jewel 2021 against Edge, and then do so again the next year in his instant classic against Cody Rhodes, which would become the main roster's first 5-star match since Cena vs Punk at Money in the Bank 2011 thus giving Seth the curious distinction of having both a 5* and negative star Cell match in his career.
• As far as Wyatt was concerned, his gimmick continued to be a heavy merchandise draw for late 2019 to early 2020, but it had become clear that creative was growing less fond of him. He would win the Universal Championship from Rollins at that year's Crown Jewel, only to lose it cleanly to Goldberg of all people at Super ShowDown a few months later. Aside from a cinematic "Firefly Funhouse match" with John Cena that he won at WrestleMania 36, he would end up mostly as an afterthought for much of 2020, only getting a second Universal Championship reign by defeating Braun Strowman at SummerSlam....only to lose it the following week to Roman Reigns, who would go on to hold the title for a record-setting run. While Wyatt would then establish an intriguing alliance with Alexa Bliss in the fall (with her becoming a co-host for his Firefly Fun House segments), his momentum once again came to a halt when he suddenly took a three-month absence at the end of the year. After returning and losing in an unconvincing fashion to Randy Orton at WrestleMania 37, Wyatt took what was planned to be a four-month hiatus for "medical reasons"^note Rumors abounded that Wyatt asked for time off to grieve the death of his close friend Luke Harper, though these were eventually debunked, only to be unceremoniously released just before his return due to budget cuts — though, once Vince had been removed from his position, Triple H gladly allowed Wyatt to return two years later, but sadly he unexpectedly died of a heart attack before much could come of it.

RETRIBUTION (2020)

RETRIBUTION was a short-lived stable that was supposed to be a modern-day nWo, being composed of five NXT call-ups hellbent on destroying anything WWE-related; however, it ended up being a prime example of everything bad about the WWE call-up of developmental superstars onto their main roster.

• The thing that probably doomed the stable right from the start was when people immediately noticed their similarities with Antifa, which was not helped by a rumor a few months prior that WWE was planning to debut a stable with such a gimmick.^note And it could have been worse. There were rumors they were planning to revive The Nation of Domination. In 2020, a year marked in the U.S. by massive protests over the treatment of African-Americans in which public opinion was overwhelmingly on the protesters' side. Fortunately, that situation doesn't have a folder on here because they ended up creating The Hurt Business instead. Stay tuned though, they will appear on this one. While there was no evidence that the rumors were true, the optics were still terrible, especially considering the political climate at that time, which to put it simply, was shifting away from the attitude WWE was trying to convey, and is likely what led to the team's subsequent neutering into ineffectual troublemakers instead of dangerous disrupters.
• The faction kept trashing the set of Raw and SmackDown until they decided to settle on Raw after it was announced that management gave them contracts for no discernible reason, thus also undermining their "anti-establishment" component.
• Then there were their awful names. Mace, T-Bar, Slapjack, Reckoning, and Retaliation. They also came out in really goofy masks, with Slapjack's being possibly the worst, looking like a bad replica of the Jason Voorhees mask made out of literal toilet paper with the added effect of making him look cross-eyed due to the eyeholes being placed too far apart.
• Their goofy mannerisms, confusing promos plagued with nonsensical metaphors, and ridiculous presentation undermined their credibility. They also never did anything particularly dangerous that would indicate this was truly an 'invasion', and instead just jumped around and screamed a lot like a bunch of teenagers. In particular, they never damaged anything that cost actual money; when they "invaded" the first SmackDown to use the Thunderdome, the group completely, carefully avoided ever risking causing harm to any of those very expensive video screens. The most they ever did was cut a few ring ropes with a chainsaw. Compare that to The Nexus assaulting officials, beating the utter tar out of John Cena and absolutely trashing the ring on their debut.
• In an episode of Raw, they confronted Vince McMahon, the chairman of the company. Having the perfect opportunity to display upon them how much they hate the company... they chose NOT to attack him. Furthermore, on that same night, all the wrestlers made distinctions between men and women. For the rest of the episode, they vanished.
• And, in order to show how much laughable a group that was supposed to be dangerous became, they hardly ever won any match. Not even after Mustafa Ali was revealed as their leader.
• All this was not helped by the fact that The Hurt Business debuted at the same time, became one of the most compelling wrestling acts WWE had for that year, and despite The Hurt Business being also heels, they engaged in an Evil vs. Evil feud with RETRIBUTION (since their motto of wanting to do business in WWE meant they didn't take kindly anything wishing to "bring down" WWE as RETRIBUTION claimed) that saw The Hurt Business handily best RETRIBUTION whenever they crossed paths, including Bobby Lashley dispatching Slapjack in just under four minutes in a US Title match at Hell in a Cell. Just to make it clear, WWE debuted two brand new factions, and made their first feud be between each other. Why did the company pit two brand new factions against each other, meaning one team would by necessity have to lose to the other and thus kill their menace right out of the gate? Either party could have feuded with literally anyone else.
• Tellingly, when the time came to choose the winner of the 2020 Gooker Awards, they won by a landslide (40% over the second, third and fourth place's 11%) over other "highlights" such as the "Eye for an Eye" match between Seth Rollins and Rey Mysterio, Raw Underground, and the dud of a match between Matt Hardy and Sammy Guevara at AEW's All Out 2020 that saw Hardy hit his head on concrete yet was allowed to continue the match despite said injury. WrestleCrap even nicknamed the faction "The Dork Order".
• The faction ended up being disbanded for good on the kickoff show of Fastlane 2021 after Ali's defeat at the hands of Matt Riddle, with Ali's bad treatment of Reckoning and Slapjack causing Mace and T-Bar to walk out on him. The faction tanked essentially all of their members' respective careers: Mercedes Martinez (Retaliation) went back to NXT before eventually being released, joining Impact and later returning to AEW; Mia Yim (Reckoning) disappeared due to the creative team having nothing for her, never returning again due to being released in November of that year; Dominik Dijakovic (T-Bar) went from having stellar matches in NXT with Keith Lee prior to RETRIBUTION to forming a Tag Team with Dio Maddin (Mace) while still carrying the overall aestethic they had on the group (except for wearing facepaint instead of masks) but did almost nothing of note before being split up in the Draft, after which Dijakovic was finally allowed to return to NXT as just "Dijak" under a Terminator-esque gimmick^note Interestingly enough, one of video packages hyping up Dijak's return was him burning his T-Bar mask and has also made several jabs at it on Twitter, while Mace got roped in the at least campy but entertaining Maximum Male Models tag team with Mansoor^note Though the team did get off to a rocky start by casting LA Knight as their manager, Max Dupri. Shortly after Triple H's takeover of Creative, Max would break off from the group and revert back to his previous persona.; Shane Thorne (Slapjack) was last seen in the André the Giant Memorial Battle of the go-home SmackDown episode before WrestleMania 37, before also being released in November; and Mustafa Ali entered into a feud with Ricochet on the C-Show Main Event, later forming and breaking up a Tag Team with Mansoor before asking for his release in 2022, which the company denied, but he would get one a year later.

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