A modest proposal: 7 ways WWE can course-correct in 2026 after an uninspired 2025

It’s fair to say 2025 wasn’t a particularly vintage year for WWE. But will 2026 be better?

If Triple H and TKO are on the hunt for ideas that might make the product feel a little less stale in the new year, here are a handful that might help get the ball rolling.

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Bring back the creativity

Remove the cornerstone that is (was!) John Cena and it’s tough to escape the conclusion that most of WWE’s PLE shows were on autopilot mode in 2025, with a lot of boilerplate matches, predictable conclusions and a lack of juicy rivalries.

My pet theory is it’s an inadvertent consequence of Triple H’s more sports-like presentation. We’ve seen over and again how the current leadership has opted for a more ESPN-friendly feel, relying on big matches to do the talking. But that has also meant stripping the “entertainment” from Vinnie Mac’s famous “sports entertainment” formula.

You can see this particularly on the weekly shows. How often do promo segments on “Raw” and “SmackDown” end up as boilerplate trash-talking, where the only question is when the interruption will come? What happened to all that rich backstage drama we used to see during the Bloodline era?

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Those narrative scenes didn’t just bring a bit of visual variety to the program, but sometimes turned into great television in their own right. Remember the high drama of the tribal court segment with Sami Zayn, for example?

Maybe actually engage a few scriptwriters every now and then, rather than just leaving the matches to tell the stories.

Make better use of the mid-card

Another hallmark of the Triple H era has been the slimmed down match cards. The effect has been more dramatic on the PLEs, but it’s affected the weekly shows too. It’s not uncommon for “Raw” to have four matches over three hours.

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Quality over quantity is welcome. But it’s also led to a dearth of opportunities on the mid-card. Secondary belts are rarely defended on the PLEs, and mid-carders who are introduced to great fanfare (Rusev, Aleister Black, Giulia) end up being booked intermittently, making it harder for the live crowds to get behind them.

Adding to the slimmed down mid-card activity is the fact that much of that stuff now takes place in WWE’s partnership promotions instead. Look at the way Legado del Fantasma and the LWO have essentially been seconded to AAA, for example, or the fact that Chelsea Green has been doing her best work alongside Ethan Page across both NXT and TNA.

As someone who cheered WWE’s new partnerships model, I have to hold my hands up here: I didn't figure it'd lead to some of the emerging talent essentially disappearing from the weekly shows. My bad.

Stop the repetitive finishes

We don’t always agree on everything at Uncrowned. But one conclusion was pretty unanimous across our wrestling columnists and reviewers in 2025: There were far too many DQ finishes in main events in WWE — particularly on “Raw.”

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To be honest, the problem hasn’t quite gone away. The DQ ratio has dropped since our investigation, admittedly, but we still seem to have too many back-to-back finishes involving members of The Vision or their allies interfering in each other’s matches — usually leading to some kind of group melee involving CM Punk, LA Knight or The Usos.

In theory, these kinds of scenes are meant to establish The Vision as the bad guys who can throw their weight around as they please. In practice, though, they just feel like the creatives are treading water until the bigger shows come around.

Shake up the PLE schedule

WWE’s success depends on its flagship monthly shows. And after a period of chop and change on that front, it now seems that Triple H has settled on his preferred schedule as to which PLEs we get and when. But has he picked the right ones?

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It’s pretty clear some PLEs are working less well than others. Take WarGames, for example, which often feels contrived given the need to hastily assemble alliances that usually get dropped straight afterward. The women’s WarGames matches tend to feel like they were booked using a Harry Potter sorting hat.

Elimination Chamber is another one. It’s a fantastic gimmick match, but the fact that it is always used to decide the remaining WrestleMania main-eventers makes it much more predictable than it used to be. Why not go back to putting titles on the line directly in the cage (the U.S. title, for example) and give it a fresher feel?

Commit to character building

I call it the curse of the character relaunch. How many WWE wrestlers have we seen brought back with flashy vignettes and a new mystique, only to see the whole idea dropped within weeks?

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White the graveyard of failed relaunches goes back a long way (Giovanni Vinci, Giovanni Vinci, Veer Mahan…), the most notorious example of 2025 has to be the whole “Ron Killings” relaunch. Despite making a pretty big splash at the time, it has since been totally retconned from existence.

I get that creatives need to run ideas up the flagpole and see what works. But how is that meant to happen when things get dropped before they’ve even had a chance to make an impact?

No more non-title matches with champions

A quick question: What exactly was the reasoning for WWE’s Women’s Champion having a non-title match against Michin on a recent “SmackDown”? Don’t get me wrong — I had no problem with the match, per se. But what was the justification for Jade Cargill not putting her title on the line?

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We saw this happen a lot in WWE in 2025. Cargill’s predecessor, Tiffany Stratton, had no fewer than five non-title singles matches on “SmackDown.” It happened on the men’s side too. Standout examples include Cody Rhodes vs. Aleister Black in November, and John Cena vs. R-Truth at Saturday Night’s Main Event back in May.

On each of these occasions it was never explained exactly why they were non-title matches. Most of the time, the champion ended up winning cleanly anyway, leaving the question as to why it couldn’t have been a standard title match.

It’s time for a much stricter approach. Non-title matches should be kept for circumstances that justify the exception — champion vs. champion matches, for example — rather than used for the sake of it.

Stop the sweary chants

This one is a personal bugbear, and a much smaller one. But hey, if you can’t use these moments to settle a few scores, when can you do it?

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Can 2026 be the year that wrestling crowds finally stop with the cursing chants? We get it: People think it’s fun to chant “f*** you, Gunther” or the like. The problem is WWE’s televised shows are still a PG product and it just ends up with the production team censoring the audio in a way that makes the shows much less fun to watch.

Would it really be so bothersome just to not swear in the first place? I know, I know — I’m shouting into the wind here. After all, this is the same fan base that insists on doing the “What?!” chant after every second promo.