WWE Decisions That Caused Outrage

The tide seems to be turning in professional wrestling these days, as WWE is garnering a lot more negativity from fans compared to recent years. When Triple H took over the creative direction of the company in 2022, it gave WWE a new lease of life, a fresh coat of paint, and a shot of adrenaline that launched the company into a new realm of popularity, ultimately leading to WWE striking a deal with Netflix in 2024. Paul Levesque could do no wrong, it seemed, but over the past few months, the honeymoon period seems to have ended, and fans are starting to grow tired of certain aspects of the company.

Premium Live Events, being five matches long, sounded good in principle, but as the rest of the roster seems to have played second fiddle to a select group of WWE Superstars, fans aren't happy with the lack of exposure for some people. The company likes to brag about their record-setting gate numbers, but they are only achieving those records by charging astronomical prices for seats that would cause nose bleeds for some people, causing some fans to question whether they should pay for a ticket to a WWE show, or their mortgage.

Of course, they are still selling tens of thousands of tickets in every arena they go to, so life for WWE isn't as bad as many people will have you believe, but it does beg the question of what moments from the past have caused fans to clap back at the biggest wrestling company in the world? That's what we are going to talk about today, so sit back, relax, and join me on a journey to Stamford, Connecticut, and through WWE's extensive archive for moments, in and out of the ring, that caused uproar amongst fans.

Starting off with the most recent example, one that has already been rectified, as Ron Killings, better known to WWE fans as R-Truth, has already returned to the company. He made his surprise return at the 2025 Money in the Bank Premium Live Event, one week after being informed that his contract wasn't getting renewed, which would have ended his 17 consecutive years of service to WWE.

Given Truth's comedic nature, many thought that his announcement on June 1, 2025, was a joke, but it was far from it. Members of the WWE locker room poured their hearts out on social media, stating how upset they were at the news that they would no longer be working with the 53-year old, as well as many fans sharing their favorite memories from Truth's near two decade run in WWE, but there wasn't just sadness, there was a lot of anger.

Multiple reports from the likes of Fightful Select, PWInsider, and the Wrestling Observer claimed that there were people who were genuinely angry at the fact Truth was being let go, calling the decision "cold" and "impersonal," and one that was made purely based off of facts and figures on how to save money, rather than looking at the bigger picture of how much of a positive influence Truth was backstage.

There was even more anger when Triple H claimed that Truth's exit and return was "all part of the show" following Money in the Bank as multiple talents, including both Truth himself and his literal son, stated that the departure was not a work, he wasn't happy about being let go, and that lying about such a thing is in bad taste, regardless of how Triple H might feel about fans hijacking WWE's creative direction.

This was covered in a list where we detailed the moments from 2024 that angered WWE fans, but it's been eight months (at the time of writing) since Triple H put his foot in his mouth about representation in WWE, and honestly not a lot has actually changed.

Following the 2024 Bad Blood Premium Live Event in October 2024, Triple H was asked about the lack of black wrestlers on the show as Atlanta, Georgia, where Bad Blood was taking place, is widely regarded as a hot bed for black culture. However, there were no black wrestlers competing on the show, with Bianca Belair, Jade Cargill, and Naomi only acting as hosts, and The Rock only showing up at the end for a brief cameo. His response to this? "I don't see the color, I don't see the nationality, I don't see any of it, I just see talent."

Triple H calling himself colorblind sent fans into a meltdown as it was painfully obvious that he had no idea what he said wrong. By answering a question about the lack of black talent on a show by saying that only the most talented wrestlers get on PLE's, he inadvertently said that none of the black wrestlers in WWE were talented enough to get on the show. 

No black men have won a match on a WWE main roster PLE since Bad Blood, with the Bad Blood hosts Bianca Belair, Naomi, and Jade Cargill being the only black individuals to pick up wins full stop. R-Truth was arguably in the most high-profile match, a non-title bout against John Cena at Saturday Night's Main Event in May, but he was told he was being let go from the company just over a week later. 

Everyone these days acknowledges Roman Reigns as their "Tribal Chief," the "Head of the Table," and so on, but fans who might have only been introduced to Reigns since the turn of the decade won't know about how polarizing "The Big Dog" used to be.

To put it simply, when The Shield originally broke up in 2014, many people assumed that either Seth Rollins or Dean Ambrose would be the man to be strapped to a rocket and launched into the WWE Championship scene. Both Rollins and Ambrose were insanely over with the WWE fans at the time, while also widely respected by the hardcore fans thanks to their work outside of WWE for companies like ROH for Rollins and CZW for Ambrose. Rollins and Ambrose would eventually wind up being WWE Champions, but it was Reigns who the company was backing as their next guy, which did not go down well at all.

Ridiculed for his lack of promo skills and weak solo work in the ring, Reigns was constantly positioned as the next face of WWE despite fans telling the company that they weren't interested. His win at the 2015 Royal Rumble caused The Rock to get booed for the first time in years, and fans to campaign that the WWE Network be shut down. His crowning moment at WrestleMania 32 is best remembered as a snooze-fest, and the persistent need to have him face Brock Lesnar made everyone, including Lesnar himself, given his post-WrestleMania 34 reaction, very tired.

Even after his return from treating his Leukemia didn't stop him from having boos rained down on him every time he made an entrance, and all of it could have been avoided had WWE listened to their fans. At least it worked out for him.

Back at WrestleMania 30, WWE introduced the Andre The Giant Memorial Battle Royal, named after the WWE Hall of Famer nicknamed "The King of the Battle Royal" thanks to his size and his ability to make people say, "How on earth are they going to eliminate Andre?" WWE decided to give the women's roster their own WrestleMania battle royal when they brought the biggest event of the year back to New Orleans in 2018 for WrestleMania 34, and the company named it after another WWE Hall of Famer, The Fabulous Moolah. However, that name did not go down well at all.

Almost immediately after the match was announced, and that the match would be named in honor of Moolah, multiple stories about the woman Moolah really was started to surface. Despite WWE claiming her to be someone who challenged gender norms and pushed women's wrestling forward, David Bixenspan of Deadspin wrote a piece about why fans were outraged at the name, and explained that Moolah promoted and trained a style of wrestling that arguably pushed women's wrestling in North America backwards rather than forwards.

Then there were the various stories of sexual abuse, trafficking, and Moolah being described as a "pimp" by some of the female wrestlers she trained, which have since been covered in the "Dark Side of the Ring" documentary series. This then outraged WrestleMania's main sponsor, Snickers, to such a degree that they stepped in and ordered WWE to change the name of the match. WWE obliged, and the match was simply called the WrestleMania Women's Battle Royal. Only two matches ever took place, in 2018 and 2019, respectively, with some fans believing that WWE scrapped the match purely because WrestleMania Women's Battle Royal didn't have the same ring to it.

Fans making their voices heard is nothing new in WWE, with "The Yes Movement," "KofiMania," and most recently "#WeWantTruth" being spread across social media to the point where Daniel Bryan, Kofi Kingston, and most recently R-Truth have got their moment in the sun. All of those fan-inspired movements could have fit here, but Cody Rhodes willingly giving up his WrestleMania 40 match with Roman Reigns was something I couldn't leave off the list.

Rhodes won the 2024 Royal Rumble and vowed to rectify his loss to Reigns at WrestleMania 39 by defeating the "Tribal Chief" for the Undisputed WWE Universal Championship. Then The Rock showed up and said, "Thank you, Cody, I'll take it from here," and Rhodes stepped aside, setting up Reigns vs. Rock for the first time ever. Naturally, this didn't go over too well.

The reception to this was overwhelmingly negative. Nearly every WWE aside from a select few wanted Cody to finish his story, and for him to hand over something as big as a title match at WrestleMania was ridiculous in kayfabe, and borderline insulting in reality. This is due to The Rock becoming a member of the TKO Board of Directors a few weeks earlier, meaning that he had the power to do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted. It was a transparent power move that everyone retaliated against.

Fortunately for Rhodes, the #WeWantCody movement worked, The Rock backed off, and Rhodes got his match at WrestleMania 40, finishing his story in the process. As for whether everything was pre-mediated, that's still up for discussion (much like R-Truth's departure, except more dramatic and long-winded), but it was another case of fans being united in their anger and rallying against WWE for making a bone-headed decision, ultimately changing the course of WWE history forever.

How could a list of WWE decisions that caused everyone to be wildly angry be complete without one of the most infamous moments in wrestling history? The night that Vince McMahon screwed Bret Hart out of the WWE Championship, or if you ask Vince, the night Bret screwed Bret, not that he would remember much given what happened immediately after Survivor Series 1997 ended.

It's been talked about to death, so to summarize, Hart was on his way to WCW and McMahon thought he'd take the WWE Championship with him, so to prevent that from happening, he got Earl Hebner to ring the bell while Shawn Michaels had him in the Sharpshooter, declaring HBK as the new champion. The fans in Montreal were ready to riot, as was Bret, who tore up the ringside area, spat at McMahon, and spelled "WCW" out for the whole world to see.

Backstage, tensions ran extremely high. The Undertaker personally told McMahon to apologize to Bret, only to be legitimately knocked out cold and sustain a concussion. The Hart family berated those they believed to be in the know, like Shawn Michaels and Triple H, and wrestlers even threatened to boycott the following night's episode of "WWE Raw" over the situation, with Mick Foley famously willing to skip the show but was talked out of it by Jim Cornette. However, the likes of Rick Rude, Jim "The Anvil" Neidhart, and The British Bulldog all left the company when their contracts expired, citing Montreal as a major contributing factor.

Vince then tried to blame Bret for everything, which ultimately backfired and led to more sympathy for "The Hitman" in the long term, and to this day, Michaels still gets anywhere from a mixed to negative reception whenever he shows his face in Montreal.

As much as it pains people to hear it, cuts and releases are commonplace in professional wrestling. If a company signs a bunch of new people, another group of people has to clear the path. It happens in sports all the time. However, wrestling falls in the middle of sports and entertainment, and when a company like WWE makes as much money as they do, they don't really need to release anyone, especially during a global pandemic.

No one likes seeing anyone lose their job in the blink of an eye, but from March 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic started to take a vice-like grip on the world, all the way through to the end of 2021 when WWE had fully settled back into a touring schedule in front of 100% capacity crowds, WWE released more wrestlers in that timeframe than they did in the previous five years put together.

The reason was always cited as "budget cuts," despite the fact that WWE were actually posting record profits at the time, and in the years since Endeavor bought WWE, the company is making more money than it knows what to do with, and yet they still find room to fire people for budgetary reasons. However, the number of people let go from WWE during the COVID-19 pandemic was so large that it was genuinely a reason why certain fans tuned out of the product entirely, as they couldn't support a company that could willingly fire people at a time when work was hard to come by. People still get released now, despite all of the record-setting gates and billion-dollar streaming deals, but it will take some doing to match the mass releases during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Cast your minds back to 2002, a year with more transitions than your average nightclub DJ set, where WWE were literally all over the place. Between the brand extension, stars like Steve Austin and The Rock not being around on a full-time basis (and in the case of Austin, gone from the company completely), and having to change their name to WWE from WWF, the company didn't know whether it was coming or going. Paul Heyman not only steadied the ship on "WWE SmackDown," putting together a TV run that is still celebrated to this day, while on "WWE Raw," they were doing storylines about necrophilia...yes, really.

In October, Triple H accused Kane of killing a girl named Katie Vick, something Kane admitted to, before "The Game" revealed that semen was found in her corpse, meaning that Kane had engaged in intercourse with Vick's dead body. This then led to Triple H dressing up as Kane, visiting a real funeral home, and pretending to have sex with a dead body. All of that made national television, and the response was as bad as you can imagine.

Dave Meltzer wrote in the Wrestling Observer Newsletter in October 2002 that fans in the arena who watched the funeral home skit booed loudly, chanted "refunds," and were as quiet as possible when the two men came out for a promo segment. At home, people tuned out in their droves, with WWE Hall of Famer Paul Bearer declaring that he had never been more proud to not work for Vince McMahon in his life due to how bad the story was. From WrestleMania X-7 to this angle in 18 months is one of the biggest drop-offs in entertainment history, and the ratings only got worse as the years went on.

Knowing what we know now, this is even more egregious.

Following a series of reports in the Wall Street Journal claiming that Vince McMahon had paid various women a total of $12 Million in hush money, as well making women sign non-disclosure agreements in order to cover up allegations of sexual misconduct, everyone thought that the skeletons in Vince's closest had finally come back to haunt him. However, the only person who didn't get the memo was Vince himself. On the June 17, 2022, episode of "WWE SmackDown," he opened the show by welcoming the fans to the show, almost parading himself in front of the camera as a way of telling the authorities, "I'm untouchable."

Given the severity of the situation, many fans who watched the show were outraged at McMahon's arrogance, and even more outraged at the fact that the fans were cheering him on. With that said, the live crowd wouldn't do themselves any favors again when Vince officially announced his retirement in July, where his daughter Stephanie opened the July 22 episode of "SmackDown" by getting everyone to chant "Thank You Vince." Most people in attendance did, and Stephanie's rallying cry to support her dad left a very sour taste in people's mouths as her dad was accused of some very serious things.

Fast forward to today, and those "SmackDown" segments have aged like milk. McMahon has essentially been blackballed by the company he ran for nearly 40 years due to the Janel Grant lawsuit, and anytime someone even vaguely praises him in interviews or on TV, they are met with an onslaught of backlash from fans reminding them of the horrific things he has done, and depending on how the Grant lawsuit ends, there might be more uproar on the horizon.