WWE Fans Are Bitterly Divided About Jey Uso Winning The Royal Rumble, And Both Sides Have A Point

It’s been roughly twelve hours since the 2025 Royal Rumble ended, and I’m still in complete shock about what happened. Tag team legend turned breakout upper mid-card/ lower main event star Jey Uso beat one of the most stacked fields in Rumble history to secure maybe the biggest wtf win in the event’s history. On a night when WWE could have chosen at least five safer and more conventional future Hall of Famers in John Cena, Roman Reigns, CM Punk, Seth Rollins and Drew McIntyre, it was instead Uso that emerged victorious, leaving fans bitterly divided over whether it was a good shock or a bad shock.

Now, before I get into the specifics of why some fans are so happy and some are so upset, let me step back real quick and provide a quick explanation for why this matters so much for those of you who might not be obsessive wrestling fans. Each year, WWE holds the Royal Rumble in late January or early February. The winner, on both the men’s and women’s sides, gets to fight for a championship of their choosing at WrestleMania in April, which is the biggest wrestling event of the year. So, in short, whoever wins is guaranteed to be part of one of the biggest matches at WrestleMania, which means Jey Uso is about to be part of one of the biggest matches at WrestleMania.

To some fans, that’s one of the most exciting WWE developments in years and a refreshing change from how things were run under Vince McMahon, who tended to prefer to push the same proven stars over and over again. To other fans, it’s a gigantic overreach and a slap in the face to all of the other proven stars who have a longer and more established track record of delivering good memorable matches in big spots. Let’s break the arguments down and talk about them more in depth.

First, let’s build the case for why Jey Uso makes sense as the Royal Rumble winner. Uso has spent most of his career in a tag team alongside his brother Jimmy Uso. Together, The Usos have won eight tag team championships and main evented the first night of WrestleMania 39. They also both played integral roles in Roman Reigns’ Bloodline story over the past few years, which many fans have called the greatest recurring plot in wrestling history. Over the past few years, Jey has started working more consistently as a singles performer, headlining SummerSlam alongside Roman Reigns in 2023 and wrestling his brother Jimmy at WrestleMania 40 in 2024.

Thanks to his trademark catchphrase, YEET, and his high energy entrances that involve coming through the crowd and doing coordinated arm movements, he’s also gotten really, really over with fans. He’s surpassed most of the company’s biggest stars over the past few months in merchandise sales, and you could make a strong case that he currently gets more crowd participation than anyone else on the entire roster. Sometimes when he’s talking on the microphone, fans will literally shout YEET after every single word or sentence he delivers. It’s the type of fan investment every performer dreams of getting, and it’s why huge celebrities like Travis Scott have started accompanying him on his walkouts. It’s also why many fans were elated to see him win last night.

WWE’s official Instagram post congratulating Uso has almost 200,000 likes already, and X exploded after his win with fans talking about how much he deserved it and what a great shock it was. Other WWE superstars also sent out more than their share of YEETs and positive social posts talking about how thrilled they were. Clearly, there’s an enormous groundswell of support for Uso.

Given all that, it’s easy to see why WWE is showing so much faith in Uso, but there are a lot of wrestling fans, especially hardcore wrestling fans, that don’t see things the same way. In fact, there are many that are downright furious. My colleague here at CinemaBlend Mick Joest was at the Rumble, and he said a healthy percentage of the crowd was very deflated, and you could see that on social, as numerous tweets calling it WWE’s worst ever booking decision and questioning why they would go there attracted many thousands of likes. I get why.

Jey and Jimmy have a long history of delivering fantastic tag team matches in big moments, but unfortunately, many of Jey’s singles matches have not been quite so well reviewed by fans. His match with Jimmy didn't make logical sense from a storyline perspective was very widely considered to be the single worst match at WrestleMania 40, and his match against Roman Reigns at SummerSlam 2023 is often talked about as one the weakest in Reigns’ 3+ year title run. His match against Drew McIntyre was clearly the low point of in-ring action during the Raw debut on Netflix, and even his matches against Gunther, who is widely considered to be one of the strongest workers on the entire roster, have gotten lukewarm responses.

Those in-ring problems are, to many fans, symptomatic of a larger issue Uso has. He’s extremely popular, but much of that popularity relies on playing to the live crowd in a call-and-response manner, which can be extremely repetitive. If he’s giving a promo, it’s fun to participate and yell YEET in between each of his sentences, but because he’s stopping in between every sentence for the fans to say YEET, it’s a lot harder to build momentum and say anything meaningful. Because a lot of his in-ring moves involve playing to the crowd in an exaggerated manner, he doesn’t look quite as believable and tends to rely on a smaller arsenal of moves he knows are over with fans and will get a positive response.

A few weeks ago, Gunther, who he will likely face again at WrestleMania, called him WWE’s company mascot. The implication was that, while he’s popular with fans, he’s ultimately a sideshow that’s not to be taken seriously. Clearly, he’s going to play into this during the lead-up to WrestleMania and try to make the case that he’s a performer who should be taken seriously. Maybe he’ll be able to make that case, but the polarizing response from fans makes it very clear that there are a lot of people he needs to win over.

I’m not sure how we’re going to remember this booking decision a few years from now. The history of the wrestling business is filled with mid-card performers who got a fun catchphrase over and were super popular for a year or so before everyone got bored and moved on. Then again, it’s also filled with a handful of performers who took a fun catchphrase and used it to propel themselves into main events for the rest of their careers.

I’m on the fence. I like Uso and am happy for him, but he needs to step up and prove why he should have gotten this nod over Cena, Punk, Reigns and everyone else. I think he’s capable, but it’s going to mean he needs to stop playing the hits every single week and start giving us something new. It means he needs to tell a story with less YEET and more layers, and he’s gonna need to pay that off with a good match at WrestleMania. Fingers crossed he can.