The biggest wrestling show of 2025 – at least when it comes to WWE – is in the books. Across two nights at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, WrestleMania 41 gave us some very newsworthy moments and a handful of excellent wrestling matches but, overall, the feeling is of being ever so slightly underwhelmed. The “grandest stage of them all” didn’t feel all that grand this time.
So what went wrong? Well, the problems started with the very beginning of Saturday night’s show. WWE, wisely, opted to put the enormously popular Jey Uso on first, getting the crowd hyped with his “yeet” dance and then overcoming the odds to beat Austrian powerhouse Gunther for his first ever world championship. And yet, when Uso’s music hit, the yeeting seemed muted. The crowd sat on its hands, metaphorically and literally, and took the shine off of Uso’s triumph.
This was a common theme throughout the first night. Nothing WWE did seemed to have the juice to encourage the 60,000 people in the stadium to get their pulses racing. New Day won the tag belts, Jade Cargill demolished Naomi, Jacob Fatu beat LA Knight to win the United States Championship, and El Grande Americano beat Rey Fenix in a mid-tier angle that felt widely out of place on such a massive show. So far, so middling.
The final two matches gave fans something to cheer about. Tiffany Stratton, surprisingly, retained her Women’s Championship against the returning Charlotte Flair in a very solid, physical encounter. Then, Seth Rollins, Roman Reigns, and CM Punk put on a decent – if unremarkable – triple threat clash elevated by a twist ending that saw Punk and Reigns’ pal Paul Heyman betray them both to side with Rollins. Even that, though, felt like scant narrative crumbs at the end of a meal that might have been satisfying enough to fill a hole at a greasy spoon cafe, but felt very disappointing at the fancy steakhouse that is WrestleMania.
Night two immediately improved things with the sort of thrilling opening bout that Saturday desperately needed. Three of WWE’s most impressive female stars – Bianca Belair, Rhea Ripley, and champion Iyo Sky – went to war in a wild sprint of a match that must rank among the best women’s division clashes in WrestleMania history. All three women’s differing styles meshed perfectly, enhanced by the storytelling around Belair and Ripley repeatedly overlooking Sky – a story that inevitably led Sky to emerge with her title reign intact. 
Rhea Ripley, Iyo Sky, and Bianca Belair put on a terrific match at WrestleMania 41
(Credit: WWE)
The second show continued to entertain with Drew McIntyre’s victory over Damian Priest in a “Sin City Street Fight”, followed by Dominik Mysterio winning the Intercontinental Championship, and Joe Hendry answering Randy Orton’s open challenge for a fun little moment. There wasn’t anything wrong with what was happening, but it never felt as monumental as WrestleMania should feel. The magic was missing.
Wrestling doesn’t thrive when it’s mediocre. It’s a carnivalesque world of pageantry and over-cranked characters, with little room for silence or subtlety. Certainly, at WrestleMania, the brush strokes are at their best when they’re broad and brightly-coloured. This year, it felt like they were painting in a very popular shade of beige – not unattractive or inelegant, but not memorable either. It’s damning that the most memorable moment from the whole weekend was probably Stone Cold Steve Austin getting over-excited behind the wheel of a quad bike and nearly taking out the front row of the crowd.
That all brings us to the main event, in which John Cena – now firmly ensconced as a villain – defeated Cody Rhodes to win his record 17th world championship. Cena is currently on a retirement tour from the wrestling business and, in March, he shocked the wrestling world when he turned heel and aligned with the corporate incarnation of The Rock – becoming a bad guy for the first time in more than two decades.
At WrestleMania, Cena leaned in to his new character, walking to the ring with a stripped-down entrance video – a deliberate rejection of the colourful, puppyish version of himself he played for years before that. In the match itself, he worked slowly and methodically to break down Rhodes and quell his fiery athleticism. As pro wrestling contests go, it was much like the rest of the show – well-executed, if not especially thrilling.
The expectation was that this match would eventually crumble into something more story-driven. The Rock would almost certainly appear and Rhodes’ pals might show up too, defending WWE’s honour from the possibility of a corporate villain at the top – just as they showed up at last year’s WrestleMania to prevent another Roman Reigns victory. 
John Cena stood tall over Cody Rhodes at WrestleMania 41
(Credit: WWE)
Some of that happened. The referee accidentally took a fall, as they so often do, and the rapper Travis Scott – previously aligned with Cena and The Rock – made his way to the ring. What followed was a fairly bog-standard bit of outside interference in a wrestling match, culminating in Cena laying out Rhodes and pinning him for the championship. That’s it. Last year’s main event felt like Avengers: Endgame; this one was barely Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
WrestleMania 41 wasn’t a bad show, by any stretch. It was a mostly adequate jamboree of wrestling, featuring at least one genuinely standout match. But my overriding memory of it in the years to come will be of a show that felt strange from its first minutes to its last, as if it never got out of second gear. For the first WrestleMania of WWE’s Netflix era, that’s a worrying sign.
WrestleMania 41 is available to stream now in the UK via Netflix. Read more here on a wrestling match that I enjoyed a lot more.
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