What’s it gonna take to get another women’s main event at WrestleMania?
Well, it’s official – Roman Reigns, Seth Rollins and CM Punk will be main eventing night one of WrestleMania this year. Now let’s be clear, it’s deserved. They along with Cody Rhodes and Jey Uso are the biggest male stars in the entire company; Jey having won the Royal Rumble has an argument for sure but as great as his opponent Gunther is in the ring, he’s not a star on the level of any of those other guys I mentioned. But this also means that for the fourth year in a row the women will not be main eventing either night of WrestleMania. Since WrestleMania has gone to two nights the women have only garnered one of the twelve available main event slots, and even that one (Sasha Banks vs Bianca Belair at Mania 37) was reportedly a day of the show call by Vince.
As for the other PLEs the 2020 Elimination Chamber show was the last one where women closing the show was a regular occurence. Which begs the question:
Just what do they have to do to get more PLE main events?
There’s a real chicken an egg situation with the women’s matches on all the PLEs. Time after time the biggest women’s matches are put somewhere else on the card while the men always find their way into the main events. We’re told that ‘best story goes on last’, which is pretty rich given that the guy who said is also the one who either comes up with or approves all the stories. If none of the stories have been good enough to go on last, then at some point you gotta ask why. If the performers are good enough, which most of us believe to be true, then it’s gotta be the material they’re given to work with. No, nothing they can do or that HHH can write will approach what this Cody/Cena feud is doing, or what the Bloodline has been doing since before he took over. But I can name several women’s matches that were on PLEs since 2020 that could have closed the show given what else was on the card that night. Here they are:
- Bayley vs Sasha Banks, Hell in a Cell 2020
- Women’s Royal Rumble 2021*
- Bianca Belair vs Bayley, Hell in a Cell 2021*
- Charlotte Flair vs Becky Lynch, Survivor Series 2021*
- Charlotte Flair vs Ronda Rousey, Backlash 2022
- Bianca Belair vs Bayley, Extreme Rules 2022
- Charlotte Flair vs Rhea Ripley, WrestleMania 39 night 1
- Becky Lynch vs Trish Stratus, Payback 2023*
And I’ll go as far as to say that not only could all of those matches have main evented, but several of them should have main evented given how the rest of the shows transpired (all the ones with a * next to them).
Now in regards to WrestleMania it seems like almost every year there’s a new, different reason. In 2020 none of the women’s title matches were big enough to get the night one spot over the Undertaker’s final match. In 2022 Stone Cold Steve Austin was coming back for one more match, in Texas. Good luck fighting that one. In 2024 the Rock was coming back to team with Roman Reigns so they had to main event night one (good luck fighting that one, too). Now in 2025 the triple threat gets the call on night one because of the magnitude of the stars in the match, which is again understandable. The bottom line is indeed the bottom line. In none of those cases could you make a legit argument why any available women’s match should have closed night one instead of what did. It’s not always that cut and dried, though.
What happened in 2023 was egregious; since the first night was not going to be taken by a returning legend there was a chance to have a women’s match close out there but there was minimal effort spent building either women’s match. Charlotte and Rhea had 3 TV segments together in 10 weeks, none in back to back weeks, while Asuka and Bianca had build straight out of WWE 2k Universe Mode – a couple of awkward post match faceoffs followed by the infamous ‘can they coexist?’ tag team match in which, duh, they did not coexist. If there was ever a booking tank job that was it. Yes Sami and Kevin vs the Usos was a part of the biggest story in wrestling from the past 25 years and deserved all the pub and creative juice that it got. If all three matches had gotten the same push and the tag match emerged as the one with the most interest then no problem. But one match got a Presidential campaign level of hype and the other two were treated like a race for a safe Senate seat that hasn’t changed parties in 50 years. And to add insult to injury, the poster graphic that is used for night one in all WWE media features Flair and Ripley, not Owens and KO or the Usos.
Good enough to sell the show after the fact, but not to have headline it the day of? Somebody failed and it’s not the ladies in the picture.
Which bring us to now. The biggest available match was Ripley vs Belair, but now that’s got turned into a triple threat with a confusing and convoluted storyline to build it. Charlotte Flair vs Tiffany Stratton is a WrestleMania worthy match for sure but it’s not a main event at WrestleMania. The women’s match with the best story, Jade Cargill vs Naomi, doesn’t have a title involved and isn’t in the conversation here. But to be honest the die was cast when another legend, this time John Cena, announced his farewell tour and in doing so instantly procured one more WrestleMania main event for himself while shuffling the remaining deck in such a way that Roman Reigns for the first time since 2020 won’t be closing night two. If Roman isn’t closing night two then he’s getting night one, folks. (One note: As anybody who talks to me knows, Roman is my favorite male wrestler of this era. I won’t ever be sad about him getting another Mania main event regardless of the circumstances.)
But what about the future? With the returning male legends supply seemingly exhausted after this year, the door should be more open in 2026 than it has been since 2021. Are there any women’s matches on the horizon that could fill that space? Why yes there are. The triple threat this year keeps Bianca vs Rhea alive as a singles match option. Bianca vs Charlotte was reportedly originally penciled in for Mania 39 and there was a teased build for it in the summer of 2023 that never came to fruition. Another match between Lynch and any of those three could be made into a Mania main event, and there’s Jade Cargill. Should Jade develop into a good enough singles wrestler then her vs any of those four fits the bill. And HHH knows this, given the second tease we got on the March 28 episode of Smackdown:
But to get there it’s going to take more than teases and a rudimentary amount of storytelling. Most of the men’s matches that have main evented WrestleMania since 2021 have been steeped in months or even years of history between the competitors. Charlotte and Rhea had that in 2023 but 95 percent of it was ignored. Rhea and Bianca have it but much of it has been waylaid to set up the triple threat match (both of them also have history with Iyo Sky much of which being ignored so far). It’s impossible for the women to compete against men’s feuds and stories, if the men get to dip into all of their history together and to speak and act out all of their resentment, hatred and disdain towards each other while the women are usually stuck with high school mean girl levels of dialogue, and feuds that often end after one match or start too late to build any real momentum before the PLE match happens. As it stands right now it’s hard to justify any women’s match main eventing any PLE because the creative work just isn’t being put in to make the kind of stories that warrant it.
This wasn’t always the case. Charlotte and Sasha Banks main evented a PPV (Hell in a Cell 2016) over a Universal Title match that was also a Hell in a Cell match. Lynch, Bayley, and Shayna Baszler were chosen to main event Survivor Series 2019 over Brock Lesnar defending the World Title and an Elimination Match that featured eight former or future World/Universal champions including Roman Reigns, Rollins, and Drew McIntyre. But now even a Women’s main event on RAW or Smackdown only happens when the men’s match deck is cleared of anything important. A big women’s match being chosen to main event over a big men’s match seems almost impossible to imagine right now (and no, the Chamber show in Perth doesn’t count; a world title match main eventing over a match to get a title shot is not something to crow about).
This is even more glaring when you can look over at NXT and see the effort put in every week, year round to build all the women characters and give them career journeys that give the proper sense of importance to everything they do. They can run three or even four women’s matches on TV with ease because they’ve put enough effort into the characters and their stories to gin up interest. The women’s division can main event an NXT PLE or special episode of TV, even when the men’s world title is being defended on the same show, because they put the time in every week to establish and reiterate who the competitors are, their histories with one another, and why this match is so important. For example Roxanne Perez constantly reminded us why being a two NXT women’s champ is a big deal by mentioning the few others to do it when she would talk about herself, and they spent several months establishing a feud between her and Giulia before the latter beat her for the title. That kind of stuff matters.
So that’s where we are right now. It shouldn’t take going to Rhea Ripley’s hometown to get her a PLE main event – and when you consider that Gunther and Drew McIntyre got PLE main events under the same circumstance then that rings even more hollow. Now with the rumors of an Evolution 2 show being planned, if that is true I expect a full scale ramp up of all things regarding the women’s division along with some big ‘I told you so’s’ from a lot of people. But even if it happens, what comes next will be the real question. If we’re back to the status quo a month later then that’s not progress.
OK, do I have any solutions? Sure, it’s pretty simple actually. On the men’s side there are roughly a dozen guys who have been occupying the highest spots on the card; they fight amongst each other and rotate in and out of the title matches. And in doing so they’ve built continuity and chemistry working together. Roman, Drew, Seth, Cody, Randy, Kevin, Sami, Finn Balor, AJ Styles, Jimmy and Jey have all been playing off of each other since at least 2022. Punk, LA Knight, Gunther and Priest have joined the party as regulars later on and have fit right in. They have ongoing, intertwining stories with each other that add to each other’s career journeys and histories and they build off of each other. The women’s side on the other hand is usually booked as a series of personal box checking – things happen in order to get this woman this accolade or that woman that accolade, without much long term world building going on leading to a lot of cold matchups that only get by on the names of the women in them. Start there. A big reason the Jade/Naomi feud has taken off is because of the history that has been built between them, but also because they’ve leaned into Naomi’s own career history as a means of her justifying her actions.
If they want it, it’s right there in front of their faces with almost every big match they can book. Charlotte, Rhea, Becky, Bianca, Iyo, Bayley, Alexa Bliss, Asuka, Nia, and Naomi all have years of fighting with and against each other to use. Jade in a short time has already gotten some of her won. Just use it! It’s right there, go all the way with it! Dig into the details of all their history and weave a continuous quilt of stories running through all of them instead of just pairing or tripling them together for a program here and a program there and then abruptly sending them on their way to the next one. There’s enough there for none of these women to have an idle moment year round. At this point there’s really no excuse not to build something like that which exists on the men’s side. Not only is more fair it also would make for a better product. And it makes it easier to incorporate newer people like Tiffany Stratton into the fold less awkwardly.
Which bring us to two elephants in the room: card space and age. We’re already into unprecedented territory on the women’s side as for the first time several of them have made it past 35 without either quitting in frustration or being dumped. But now comes the hard part in keeping them around while newer women come in, and finding spots for all of them worthy of their talents. Randy Orton gets to main event PLEs at 40-something years old and 20+ years in the business, and over 84 percent (21 out of 25) including Orton and Kevin Owens) of the men who were announced for WrestleMania matches this year are over 35 and 68 percent of them (17 of 25) are either past 40 or will turn 40 this year. One the other hand out of the 11 women who are booked only four are over 35 (last year it was 4 out of 10 for the women and 23 out of 32 for the men). Developing the kind of continuity that’s necessary for what I’m suggesting is going to require not just longer careers but more space on the card, my last topic.
This year is the first time in years that there has been a women’s singles match that was not for a title. The last one was in 2020 at WrestleMania 36 (Natalya vs Liv Morgan) and that was on the preshow. There’s only been one non title feud that I can think of between two top level women in the since the Women’s Revolution started in 2015, Lynch vs Stratus. Doing more of those would go a long way towards getting more main events and not having anything to do for the top other women other than hold or challenge for a title. That’s not a problem on the men’s side as we got Drew McIntyre vs CM Punk last year, and were in the middle of Owens vs Sami Zayn and then Orton before KO was injured. Rollins has feuded with Edge, Owens and Rhodes and is now feuding with Reigns and Punk. Priest and McIntyre have a WrestleMania match this year as well. Other than Becky vs Trish (and a brief return in early 2024 to the Lynch/Jax feud that never happened) the closest thing we got was some teased festering animosity between Bianca and Charlotte in 2023 that never came to fruition.
So to wrap it up the women should have gotten more main events and should be getting more main events, but the pathway to it isn’t established and until it is, what we get it what we got.
Stroke of Genius 