The capacity crowd at Capital One Arena greeting Paul Levesque with a wall of jeers, chants for rival companies, and demands that he be replaced by his predecessor, who is currently embroiled in a high-profile sex trafficking lawsuit, was the perfect cap for a year where WWE has managed to fetter away goodwill from its most dedicated audience, replacing it with the bored cynicism that plagued the company during the 2010s.
John Cena’s final match, which resulted in the beloved eternal hero the company has relied on for nearly two decades tapping out while awkwardly smiling into the camera, encapsulated a comedically mismanaged final year for Cena, the company’s biggest star since The Rock and Steve Austin, which has largely served to undermine Levesque’s reputation as the creative savior of WWE.
Things began trending downwards when Cena shockingly turned heel at Elimination Chamber in February, something Cena had famously avoided doing throughout his extended tenure as the top star in the company. While the original angle, which was reportedly an idea from The Rock, was well-received by fans and critics, things quickly fell apart when it became clear that Cena’s heart was not in being a heel, and the company had little creative plans for this once-in-a-lifetime heel turn, as Cena cut generic “you people” heel promos and feuded with all of his familiar opponents, including CM Punk and Randy Orton.
A booker’s job is to read and anticipate what the audience is going to become invested in and enjoy seeing. The decision to turn Cena heel was a fundamental misreading of what those fans wanted to see. While the WWE audience in 2012 may have been clamoring for a Cena heel run, the WWE audience in 2025 was clearly not. They wanted Cena’s last year to be Cena playing his greatest hits and instead they were given some soulless music off his new album.
The fact that there was no real creative thought put into Cena’s heel run didn’t help matters. Cena’s heel run amounted to boring promos and matches like “Cena vs Orton Part 492, but this time Cena is a heel!”– akin to a creatively-bereft movie studio trotting out an old film franchise for one last sequel with a lame twist, which is a pretty accurate description of Levesque’s creative time in 2025.
Following Cena’s abrupt babyface turn, which basically was him saying “Haha, I was just kidding about all that heel stuff” right before his SummerSlam match against Cody Rhodes, Cena’s retirement run was still plagued by inappropriate creative decisions. Cena was squashed by Brock Lesnar at WrestlePalooza, a bizarre decision where fans who wanted to see Cena one final time in person instead watched Cena get obliterated by Lesnar in short order. He then proceeded to lose to Dominik Mysterio at Survivor Series in a slip-on-the-banana-peel match that was booked as if Cena was any other babyface on the roster instead of a retiring legend.
His final match came at the conclusion of a heatless tournament where various WWE midcarders and forgotten employees like Zack Ryder and Dolph Ziggler vied to wrestle Cena in his final match, while all the important big stars were occupied in their own feuds and ignored Cena in his final days. Instead of setting up a major feud for his final match, the creatively bankrupt WWE used Cena’s retirement as a creative crutch to kill TV time with heat-less matches featuring wrestlers fans did not care about.
The match itself was quite good in a vacuum, thanks to the support Cena had from his loyal fans, who paid an arm and a leg to get into the building, and the heel work in the match by Gunther. The issue was the finish, which saw Cena, for the first time in his career that anyone could remember, tapping out to Gunther while in a sleeper hold. The man whose catchphrase for decades was “Never Give Up” just simply gave up in his final match.
The crowd was shocked and angry. Again, this was a crowd that desperately wanted to see Cena hit all his signature moves one final time–they literally chanted for “SuperCena” during the match. Instead, they saw Cena defeated by a heel who most fans last remembered as losing to Jey Uso at WrestleMania.
Following the match, as he has arrogantly done throughout Cena’s final year, Levesque came out to get some attention from the crowd, only this time the crowd understood that Levesque was to blame for the finish to the match, and they destroyed Levesque with the aforementioned calls for his removal and chants for AEW and Vince McMahon. Levesque has constantly put himself front and center since taking over for McMahon, wanting to let everyone know that he is charge of the company.
On Saturday, it bit him right on the nose.
Predictably, Levesque was defiant during the post-show, sitting at a table in front of the live audience and taunting the crowd that was critical of him. Of course, Levesque is the same man who canceled his “press conferences” earlier this year because of his inability to appropriately respond to even the mildest forms of criticism coming from fans and media. My guess is that Levesque will stop appearing in front of crowds shortly if his reception continues to be sour.
— NHATional Scissoring Day ✂️ (@nhathanielh.bsky.social) 2025-12-14T03:58:29.729Z
Cena losing to Gunther is not that surprising–veteran wrestlers putting over a younger wrestler on the way out is seen as the “right way” for a wrestler to retire, especially a major star like Cena. Fans probably would have been receptive to Cena going out with a loss, except that WWE mismanaged Cena’s entire final year, meaning that his final match ending with him tapping out was the nail in the coffin of Cena’s underwhelming retirement tour.
If fans had been given a year of vintage, SuperCena leading up to a huge final match where he put over Gunther, the reaction would be much more positive. Instead, his final year was wasted on a heel turn nobody asked for, a squash match to Brock Lesnar, and a feud with midcard comedy heel Dominik Mysterio. Cena’s final match ending in completely uncharacteristic fashion was just the final straw for fans in attendance.
The failure to fully deliver during Cena’s final run is just one issue Levesque’s creative regime faces. The company is short on young, new stars and is continually relying on figures like CM Punk, Brock Lesnar, and Seth Rollins to carry the company. Rollins’ heel run on RAW this year was a disaster, with RAW falling off most rankings for Netflix during its inaugural year on the streaming service. Roman Reigns remains in an interminable Bloodline-related feud that has lost all momentum and is oversaturated with dead-weight talents. Cody Rhodes, the biggest babyface in the company, has been flat in 2025 after working as a tremendous draw in 2023 and 2024, and seems to be without any strong creative direction.
Cena’s popularity as a drawing act in his final year potentially has masked a general decline in interest in WWE throughout 2025–with non-Cena live event attendance cratering and advances for shows in 2026 appearing to be far behind where they were in 2025 with Cena on the card. The goodwill that Levesque achieved following McMahon’s ouster has worn off, and in 2026, he will likely be forced to reckon with a fanbase that no longer looks upon him favorably.
