Gunther retired John Cena in December, and nothing WWE has done since explains what that was supposed to mean. I don’t need Ilja Dragunov to tell me the company is wasting Gunther. I need WWE’s creative department to explain, on the record, what the plan was for the man who ended its biggest star’s career, because ten months later there still isn’t one.
Here’s what actually happened, because it’s worth saying plainly before anyone tells you this is just fans being dramatic. Gunther ended Bill Goldberg’s career with a sleeper hold at Saturday Night’s Main Event in July 2025. He made Cena tap out at the same event five months later. He forced AJ Styles into retirement at Royal Rumble. Three retirements in a little over six months, against three names with real drawing power, is not something a company stumbles into. That’s a promotion handing its top heel the single most valuable currency wrestling has, over and over, on purpose.
And then it apparently forgot what that currency was for. The planned follow-up to the Cena match was reportedly a Rey Mysterio program for WrestleMania 42, which fell apart the moment Mysterio got hurt. Gunther disappeared from television for close to a month. He came back in late March shoved into a hastily built Seth Rollins feud that he only won because Bron Breakker showed up to do the actual work for him. A program with LA Knight got scrapped before it aired. He landed on SmackDown chasing Cody Rhodes and the WWE Championship and never won it, somewhere along the way dropping a Money in the Bank qualifier in a match that also had CM Punk and Finn Balor in it. He hasn’t held the World Heavyweight Championship since he lost it. Go watch the powerbomb that put Nick Aldis through a table before SummerSlam even started and then try to explain to me how the same guy capable of that has spent most of this year losing far more than he’s won.
Dragunov said the quiet part in an appearance on The Ariel Helwani Show, and he said it standing on his way out the building. He’s about two months removed from his own exit from WWE and three days removed from his AEW debut at WrestleDream, which means he had nothing left to protect when he said this:
“If you are the person to retire John Cena, it’s a status that you should keep a certain level of that. This is not necessarily the level we’re working at right now.”
Fine. A guy who just left for the competition saying WWE fumbled something is easy to write off as sour grapes, even when he’s right. What’s harder to write off is Cena agreeing with him, unprompted, on Busted Open Radio weeks later:
“I know there’s sentiment out there that, like, Man, they’re wasting Gunther! Maybe currently they are.”
That’s the guy WWE built its entire year-end narrative around, and he just told a national radio audience that the fans might be right. Cena hedged the rest of it, saying he’s not in the creative meetings and his job ended the night the match did, which is a fair thing for him to say and also exactly the problem. His job ended. Somebody else’s was supposed to start right there, and instead WWE let him go on the air and confirm what everyone had already been saying for months.
Here’s one more person making the same case, because I’m hardly the only one who noticed:
https://twitter.com/FadeAwayMedia/status/2112615272544702773
The general sense around the product right now, SmackDown especially, is that nobody ever had a plan past the night Gunther won. That’s the part that should actually bother you, more than anything Dragunov or Cena said out loud. A wrestler cooling off after a big year is normal. A promotion creating the best heel run it’s had in a decade and then having no idea what it was holding is just bullshit dressed up as patience.
My brother spends his days untangling how cities actually spend money in Trenton, and the one lesson he’s handed down that applies here is that institutions rarely fail because they’re broke. They fail because they can’t tell what they already have. WWE has Gunther. It’s had him for two years, three retirements deep. It still hasn’t figured out what that’s worth, and at some point “we’ll get to it” stops being a plan and starts being an answer.
