Arguably one of the most polarising figures in the history of professional wrestling, John Cena burst onto the scene 13 long years ago from the class of developmental that brought you the likes of other WWE legends such as Batista, Randy Orton and Brock Lesnar.
Just three years later, at WrestleMania 21, Cena defeated JBL to earn his first WWE Championship. Fast forward another ten years and John Cena is the most decorated superstar over the past decade, holding 15 world championships at some point or another. However, Cena isn’t getting any younger and at almost 38 years of age people are starting to question whether Cena is entering the twilight of his career.
All signs are pointing to Cena being in the downtown of his run with the company now. Back at the Royal Rumble, Cena was fighting for the WWE Championship, but now as we approach WrestleMania he will be fighting Rusev for the US title. That’s quite the drop in stature from the face of the company.
The question remains – is he the face of WWE any more? With Roman Reigns being made to look really, really strong in the build up to his WrestleMania main event match against Brock Lesnar, could Cena be seeing the end to all of his years of hard work? Is he truly being replaced?
Reigns has all the characteristics that it would take to find himself in the top spot; his mic skills have improved, he has been putting in more stellar quality matches and he has even taken the Cena spot of losing a match and coming back to beat up everybody around him so that it doesn’t look like he has lost.
Going back to Cena’s focus for WrestleMania 31 – the United States Championship – begs the question as to how many superstars have won the US title after a long run of winning WWE titles and made it back to the top of the mountain? For years it seemed like the odds were in Cena’s favour to become the man to beat the man and surpass Ric Flair’s record of 16 world titles during his career. That’s all been left up in the air now.
With future top stars currently working their way through WWE coming at the same time as Reigns’ rise to the top, Cena might find that his days of a guaranteed title run every year are over. Soon enough, we might find that he may not even have time to cut a 20 minute promo on RAW. Could this be the end of an era in WWE?
Nah, he’ll form the nWo v2.0 and be around for another five to ten years doing that.
In all honesty, a Cena heel reign seems like it could be on the horizon. Once WWE trials Reigns as the face of the company (sorry Randy, your time is up too), we could see that Cena may not be the number one merchandise seller any more; with that could open a whole new realm of possibilities for where the former doctor of thuganomics can go.
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