WWE Royal Rumble 2026: Biggest Winners & Losers

Usually, I have a pretty standard opening to these things. "Another PPV has come and gone, and there's plenty to talk about," and all that good stuff. But I'm going to be very real with you, The Wrestling Inc. readership: Yesterday's Royal Rumble was probably one of the worst events I've watched in a long time. I legitimately considered doing an "All Losers" edition of this, but I decided that wouldn't be completely fair to AJ Styles and Gunther, who were seemingly the only people given anything to work with on this special event.

So, I will do my best to find some winners in this mess of a show. If you want to know what happened, the results page has taken care of that. This will instead be a chance for me to vent about the dire state of WWE's Big 4 PLEs, if they are to continue to make the trek to the reaction vacuum known as Saudi Arabia.

Let's get the biggest losers out of the way, and then we can dig deeper into the winners and losers of the 2026 Royal Rumble.

The two Rumble matches were long slogs to safe choices. I expected Sami Zayn to lose the world title match, but he did so in such a fashion that I'm not sure he'll be a legitimate contender for a while. Michael Cole was checked out, and the crowd doubly so. The new stadium, much like the Intuit Dome, has little lights on every seat that makes it look empty, no matter how many people might be there. It was the closest I've ever seen a post-pandemic PLE feel so much like a ThunderDome COVID taping.

Look at the lead image. Look at that sea of lights behind the competitors. From what I understand, from production close-ups on the crowd, and photos from social media, the newly-built Riyadh Season Stadium was quite full. Not quite a sellout, but still, fairly full. But from the way the lights make it look, one would assume they were wrestling in front of a couple of thousand fans in the floor seating and an empty grandstand. This was not the case, but the crowd was not the most energetic in WWE history, and the way the architecture made it appear made the event feel deserted. This is the first major event.

Roman Reigns and Liv Morgan are incredibly boring choices for WrestleMania, as it is, but the Rumbles themselves were stuck in a slow tempo, so as to accommodate as many up-to-the-minute graphics as possible, whether they were accurate or not.

It was a show that felt like it was made out of papier-mache and the other lightweight, gossamer material that comprised the Chicago World's Fair. A massive, ostentatious nothing in place of one of the WWE PLE calendar's more reliable gems.

If the Royal Rumble is usually a Faberge Egg to the fans every year, then Saturday's event was one of those plastic Easter eggs your parents used to use to pad out the basket. Luckily, there was a little bit of candy inside.

AJ Styles has always been a different flavor of John Cena. In that way, it's fitting that the end to his WWE career is just a different shade of Cena's retirement. Styles inverted Cena's retirement tour, instead retiring in a near-surprise, but ended up in the same place, Gunther's Rear-Naked Choke. The match was good, and Styles's post-match cheekiness was also fun.

A solid decade of AJ Styles in WWE, and he has a lot to show for it: WWE Titles, classic matches, long, soccer-mom locks, but it's time for him to move on, and it felt like WWE gave him an appropriate send-off. His retirement was about as shocking as his debut in WWE, which had been rumored, only to be confirmed on the night of the Royal Rumble.

Gunther is also making a name for himself as a sure thing in big match situations. Sure, he lost to Pat McAfee and tapped out to Jey Uso, but his string of retirements and his bloody match with CM Punk at SummerSlam have built him back up as a merciless killer. The entire match was just a good piece of business overall.

The best thing you can do for your career is be Roman Reigns. There are a lot of wrestlers who never feel like they're going to break through to the next level, and my advice to them would be to be Roman Reigns. When you are Roman Reigns, things simply work out for you. Food tastes better. Colors are brighter. You only have to go to work a few days a month, if that. The key to a happy life might simply be having the life of Roman Reigns.

Reigns's blessed existence continued on Saturday with his victory in the Royal Rumble, punching his ticket to his 1,785th WrestleMania. That figure might be exaggerated, but barely. Bron Breakker, Bronson Reed, Cody Rhodes, and even Logan Paul all made the grave error of not being Roman Reigns on Saturday and thus were thrown over the top rope one by one, until "The Tribal Chief" was the last one standing. We are stuck with another Roman Reigns Road To WrestleMania. Maybe The Rock will get involved, unless he plans to put all of his backing behind the makeup team from "The Smashing Machine" this award season.

The last time Sami Zayn lost a big world title match, he at least had the excuse of being in the middle of the end of Roman Reigns's epic multi-year reign. He was the last defense before Reigns faced Rhodes at WrestleMania 39, setting the stage for his loss at WrestleMania 40 the next year. It was a bitter pill for Sami Zayn fans to swallow, but you could swallow it.

At the Royal Rumble, in what announcers described as a "home game" for the Muslim star, Zayn gave Drew McIntyre everything he had, and it simply wasn't enough. It is looking like the bowl that is fueling the pipe dream of world champion Sami Zayn is close to cashed, and I'm not sure we have the smoke to pack another one. McIntyre clearly has unfinished business with Cody Rhodes, and WWE clearly sees them as a more marketable main event than any combination that could involve Zayn. Maybe he ends up in a three-way, or maybe they add Jacob Fatu and make it a four-way, but either way, I just don't see Zayn coming out on top any time soon.

It was a tremendous match, possibly one of Zayn's best in WWE, which is why it's so hard to admit the dream might be over, but I think I can hear the alarm clock blaring.