WWE SummerSlam 2025: Biggest Winners & Losers

SummerSlam 2025 has come and gone. For the primary time ever, the summer supercard stretched over two nights, essentially becoming the WrestleMania of the summer. The show was filled with moments, matches, highs, and lows, all of which have been documented on the outcomes page, in addition to our Loved and Hated column. It’s now time to interrupt down the winners and the losers.

In some cases, the losers can be literal losers, like Karrion Kross, who finds himself with loads of fans and little or no narrative momentum. In some cases, the winners can be winners, like Cody Rhodes, who got to have a very good match after which f*** off before things went sideways on the top of night 2. With two nights of SummerSlam motion, there was no shortage of things to discuss, so without further ado, let’s break down the winners and the losers from SummerSlam 2025.

I must be clear. SummerSlam 2025 was a banner night for Brock Lesnar. He made a triumphant return to WWE, following the fundamental event of SummerSlam, even getting dubbed “Mr. SummerSlam” in the method. His reception from the group was explosive, and he will get one last shot at John Cena before Cena retires. His return also marks a win in the shape of WWE legal clearing the controversial star of being any sort of business liability. On the shallowest, most elementary level, Brock Lesnar is the winner of SummerSlam 2025, and WWE as well, for filling social media with equal parts celebration and outrage, essentially playing each side against the center. 

Nevertheless, there’s an old saying: sunlight -or on this case, the spotlight- is the perfect disinfectant. Now everyone has a reason to bring up why he’s been gone for the higher a part of two years, and for that, he’s probably lost his legacy for good.

Despite being cleared by WWE legal, Lesnar remains to be very much named in Janel Grant’s lawsuit against Vince McMahon, John Laurinaitis, and WWE. Lesnar is alleged to have solicited sexual acts and media from Ms. Grant, as a part of his contract negotiations with WWE, backed up by screenshotted text messages, which is why McMahon and the remainder have been accused of sex trafficking by Grant. For the last two years, the corporate has decided that any possible pop from the group wouldn’t be definitely worth the black cloud that Lesnar’s allegations would bring to the corporate. WWE and Lesnar crossed the Rubicon on Sunday, essentially deciding that the heavily-touted “SummerSlam Moments” were more vital than any bad vibes that supporting someone currently involved in lively sex trafficking litigation might cause. Paul Levesque has since placed the blame squarely on John Cena’s shoulders, saying he’s merely doing his best to accommodate Cena’s requests on the previous Undisputed WWE Champion’s retirement tour, clearly sensing that to take any true credit for Lesnar’s return could be beyond the pale for any executive who knows what they’re doing.

It was a scene that had some WWE fans celebrating, and had others repeating Joseph Welch’s words to Sen. Joseph McCarthy, “Have you ever no sense of decency, sir, in the end? Have you ever left no sense of decency?” From an ethical, moral, and even spiritual sense, everyone probably lost on Sunday, but we live in a world where attention is currency, and so I even have to place one within the win column. 

Before Brock Lesnar sent the whole lot sideways on Sunday, Cody Rhodes and John Cena had the match that everybody kinda wished they’d had at WrestleMania. It was an excellent cartoon spectacle; two titans of the wrestling world battling to see which ones is the more outsized persona. Rhodes and Cena pulled out all of the stops, kicked out of every kind of super finishers, and Rhodes got here out on top, ready to guide this company for the following decade. 

Rhodes’s win was electric, the group was on fire, Cena looked thoroughly impressed and humbled, they shared some kind words, shook hands, after which Cody got the hell out of Dodge. There’s numerous heat on the ending of SummerSlam, as I just wrote, and literally none of it’s on Cody Rhodes. Considering his history with Lesnar, I even have little question he’ll cross paths with the cursed legend sooner or later, but you actually do must hand it to “The American Nightmare” for sneaking out of the finale of SummerSlam on the last moment, and remaining unscathed by the bummer that was Brock Lesnar’s return. There’ve already been a plethora of memes showing Cody and Cena, saying “Thank God SummerSlam ended here,” and that’s value its weight in gold as of late.

It’s a wise move. The corporate as a complete cannot shake the choice to bring back Lesnar, but Rhodes is strictly the sort of aloof company man who can pull off the “well, aw shucks, I used to be just celebrating with the title, I didn’t find out about that” that can be required within the weeks following SummerSlam, at the least until he inevitably wrestles Brock on the Saudi Royal Rumble.

At this point, I would completely consider that Karrion Kross has been an experiment by Miami University to see if you happen to could make a wrestler solely out of social media hype and a few jiujitsu training, and the outcomes have been a fairly firm “Perhaps?”

I do not normally like to provide such a literal definition of a loser, but losing a match that was reportedly only on the show because that they had an additional slot is just like the textbook definition of a loser.

Kross actually appears to be an unkillable presence in wrestling. Just while you think the fanbase has completely rejected him and WWE has given up, they offer him something else to do. Kross has spent the summer principally needling Sami Zayn about how he is not “world champion material” and he needs to search out his own Dark Passenger, kinda like if Dexter Morgan were a fan of the show “Dexter” as an alternative of a serial killer. Sami Zayn thoroughly beat Kross at SummerSlam, and now Kross goes to must hang around backstage some more, waiting for another person to neg. He’s sort of just like the Pick-Up Artist: Openly confident, antagonistic to the purpose of parody, and usually, sort of an intense loser. It’s like Kross is attempting to cut the identical “You are not pretty much as good as you think that you’re” promo that Adam Cole cut on him all those years ago, except that he keeps getting his ass handed to him by the person to whom he delivers the promo. It’s like a vicious cycle of loserdom.

WWE set Jelly Roll as much as fail, quite frankly. The entire discuss how good he’s been in training, and the entire hype for the match, just about put it on Jelly Roll’s shoulders to deliver something, anything, that would compare to the likes of Bad Bunny or Logan Paul. While he wasn’t quite the athlete those two men are, Mr. Roll actually has the spark. He looks like a gas station attendant who suddenly got famous, and that relatability, his bread and butter, carried him to success on Sunday.

It just isn’t controversial to say that WWE just isn’t necessarily a match-first company, which meant that Jelly Roll didn’t have to do a 450 Splash or anything ridiculous, he just had to provide some offense, take some offense, and mug for the camera, and Jelly Roll looked as if it would “get it” in a way that many trained wrestlers don’t. It’d sound like a low and ridiculous bar, but Jelly Roll stands alongside the likes of The Rizzler in relation to knowing his role and never doing anything greater than needed. Jelly Roll delivered some facial expressions that belong within the wrestling hall of fame, his big basset hound eyes near-tears, his tattooed face wracked with pain, pleading for help from the fans. Jelly Roll was a natural performer on Sunday, who let Logan Paul do all of the crazy stuff while Randy Orton and Drew McIntyre focused on the basics. 

This business is barely hard if you happen to make it hard, and everybody involved within the tag match made it easy for Jelly Roll to do what he does best: be relatable.

Roman Reigns and Jey Uso reunited at SummerSlam, putting an end to their years of animosity and repairing their familial bond with violence and victory, and it had absolutely nothing to do with the Bloodline Civil War occurring over on “SmackDown.” That’s as damning an indictment as I’ve ever written a few storyline.

Outside of an occasional Jimmy Uso run-in, the Bloodline has essentially change into a Ship of Theseus, with almost the whole lot of the faction replaced with latest people, and now all those people hate one another. It’s becoming kinda grating television. It didn’t help that Solo Sikoa and Jacob Fatu’s steel cage soap opera was put at the top of a marathon of violence. There was literally nothing they might hope to perform that would top a TLC match and a No Disqualification match, try as they did. The Bloodline has simply run out of moves. There are only so many run-ins that I can care about, until I just change into numb to the entire thing. Sikoa, easily the least interesting a part of the situation, has been a central figure on this Pacific Islander power struggle for a lot too long. It’s borderline criminal that Jeff Cobb doesn’t have anything higher to do than be muscle.

The group is becoming self-parody, and the one method to end it’s to, well, end it. Get everyone to the Samoan version of Appomatox Courthouse and put this storyline out of its misery.