WWE Royal Rumble 2026 Review

Royal Rumble 2026 arrived with WWE in a familiar position: creatively stagnant, structurally predictable, and increasingly comfortable staging its biggest shows in places it would rather you not interrogate too closely. This year’s Saudi Arabia setting was impossible to ignore, even by WWE’s usual standards. A stadium reportedly constructed in just three weeks, under conditions widely suspected to involve modern slave labour, served as the gleaming backdrop for the night’s spectacle.

WWE’s willingness to operate in this environment is a conscious choice. A choice to accept blood-soaked money, to sanitise exploitation through production gloss, and to proceed as if the human cost is an externality rather than a prerequisite. That complicity hangs over the show, whether WWE acknowledges it or not.

The Royal Rumble format thrives on momentum, surprise, and the illusion of possibility. But in the current cooled-off WWE environment, that illusion was already under strain before the opening bell rang. Big entrances, and big ‘moments’ mean very little when urgency is absent and consequences feel theoretical. The one hope heading into this show was whether WWE could see its own current flaws and make necessary adjustments as it kicks off the road to Wrestlemania officially.

Match #1 – Women’s Royal Rumble

I heard if you complained about the slave labour conditions while building the stadium, the Saudi government made you sit through this match.

For the supposed “storytelling” company, this had no sense of flow or narrative logic in its participant order. Nothing built. Nothing escalated. Work was sloppy throughout, with sequences blurring together into an hour-long Disney Channel sketch.

The facial expressions and acting were sub–community theatre level, and every moment was played at the same volume. The irony is that a match so desperate to manufacture “moments” ended up making nothing feel important. WWE is clearly trying to show every wrestler respect by giving them time and spotlight, but when everyone is presented as special, nobody actually is.

This perfectly encapsulated the milquetoast state of American wrestling in 2026: a product obsessed with entrances, taunts, and dramatic staredowns, and fundamentally uninterested in constructing a coherent wrestling match.

0.5 stars – Sloppy, uninteresting dreck. Worst of the Night.

Match #2 – AJ Styles vs Gunther

WWE booked itself into a no-win situation here. Either you retire a 26-year career in Saudi Arabia, or you beat Gunther immediately after he retired John Cena. There was no clean outcome available.

What followed was a very good, if unsurprising, match. AJ’s early focus on Gunther’s leg had been clearly telegraphed in the weeks prior through repeated Calf Crusher usage, and it provided a strong, believable throughline that paid off in a nearfall bridging into the match’s second half.

AJ worked through a nasty cut on his arm from early on, and Gunther gave him more sustained offence than he typically allows. This wasn’t close to either man’s best work, but it’s a reminder that these two operating at 75% are still comfortably ahead of most of WWE’s roster. 

Yes, there was the obligatory finisher kickout spam that plagues every American “big match,” but once that passed, the match found a second wind. The closing stretch of heavy, ugly strikes felt physical and earned, with both men trading convincing receipts. The sleeper finish, however, arrived abruptly and deflated what momentum had been built.

This was a strong match that suffered from familiar WWE pacing issues rather than poor execution. It’s well worth your time. And while I don’t believe for a second that AJ Styles is actually finished, if this were the end, it would be a respectable one.

3.5 stars - Strong structure, good physicality, and a finish that arrived before the match fully peaked. Match of the Night.

Match #3 – Drew McIntyre vs Sami Zayn - Undisputed WWE Championship

The combination of Gunther winning earlier and the glacial pace of the opening stretch here had even the usually compliant Saudi crowd quiet and restless.

There isn’t much to say about this match, largely because there wasn’t much in it. Both men went through their motions, hitting familiar spots without any sense of danger or urgency. It was wrestling with the bumpers up. Not long ago, Sami Zayn and Ilja Dragunov were beating the hell out of each other on a weekly basis. This was the complete opposite of that energy.

They did the obligatory lethargic finisher kickout. They did an announce table spot at half speed. WWE dutifully cued up THISISAWESOMECHANT.mp3. Drew paused the match to cut a mid-ass-kicking promo telling Sami to stay down, then immediately hit his finish and won. 

Flat, listless, and dull even by WWE standards.

2 stars - A lifeless title match that checked every WWE box without ever feeling remotely dangerous.

Match #4 – Men’s Royal Rumble Match

This sat squarely in the middle of the pack for Royal Rumbles, but it was vastly more enjoyable than the women’s match earlier in the night. The stars felt like stars, there were genuine crowd-pleasing surprises (Powerhouse Hobbs), strong individual showings (Je’Von Evans looks like a future main-eventer, and Oba Femi impressed), some well-placed silliness to break things up (El Grande Americano vs El Grande Americano), and at least one fresh direction established (Drew McIntyre vs Cody Rhodes).

It wasn’t without its issues. There were long stretches of dead air with too much corner-sitting, Jey Uso’s fourth-wall-breaking nonsense returned and remained deeply cringe, and Brock Lesnar was dumped out with all the fanfare of a house show elimination. Roman Reigns is also a profoundly uninspiring choice as winner, particularly given how casually Gunther was dispatched after such a dominant year.

What really soured things, though, was Bron Breakker drawing the #2 spot and being eliminated in fifteen seconds due to — shockingly — a mystery attacker in a black hoodie. This exact device has now been used to kick off three separate feuds in the past year. At this point, Triple H appears to book using only three storylines: (1) retirement angle, (2) mystery attack by masked man in a black hoodie, and (3) a woman in leather fights her friend.

All of that aside, the match itself was enjoyable enough. A by-the-numbers Royal Rumble is like pizza — even when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good.

3.25 stars - Enjoyable in spite of itself, undone by familiar WWE booking tics.

AVERAGE RATING: 2.31 of 5 stars (or 4.62 of 10)
SUMMARY: Royal Rumble 2026 was functional, hollow entertainment, a show carried almost entirely by the resilience of its format rather than the strength of its ideas. WWE once again proved it can manufacture spectacle on demand, even atop exploitation and creative inertia, but offered little evidence that it has either the interest or the ability to do anything more.