WrestleMania 41 has come and gone. Both nights were loaded with winners and losers, as is the nature of professional wrestling, and now it's time to break down the less explicit winners and losers.
If you want the results, we have a results page, for both nights. If you want what we loved and hated, we have that too. This will instead be about who looked good, who looked bad, who turned victory into defeat, defeat into victory, and so on and so forth. With two nights of action, there was plenty to choose from on this front. Some will be simple, like Joe Hendry's WrestleMania moment, some will be more complicated, like the effect of WWE's big acquisition on the wrestling landscape. Sometimes it will just come down to me not liking a guy, like Logan Paul.
Without further ado, the winners and losers from WrestleMania 41.
Many people laughed at Joe Hendry's repeated attempts to insert himself into the conversation about John Cena's opponents on Cena's farewell tour, but self-promotion is the lifeblood of professional wrestling. Hendry proved that on Sunday when he took on one of Cena's chief rivals at WrestleMania 41, Randy Orton.
It's very hard to write off Hendry's pie-in-the-sky dreams of wrestling John Cena when he just wrestled a legitimate contemporary of Cena's on short notice. Kevin Owens is not medically cleared to compete. WWE needs a surprise opponent for Randy Orton, who will take the focus off the fact that it's not a returning Rusev or a debuting Jeff Cobb. Thus, they dialed up the reliable human Rick Roll, Joe Hendry. It really is an amazing story.
Hendry didn't win, and he also ate a second RKO after the match, but it is undeniable that the TNA World Champion's persistence paid off. You can be the most athletic, the most charismatic, the most accomplished, but if you're not putting yourself out there, all of that will be for naught.
As of Saturday, there is one less major professional wrestling promotion in the world. AAA is now WWE. As a fair-weather AAA fan like myself, who gets TripleMania fever the way that I get World Cup fever every four years, this won't mean much, but for the actual fans of Lucha Libre, this is a seismic shift in the landscape of professional wrestling.
AAA working with WWE money is going to lead to a number of prospective luchadors taking the money of AAA over the prestige of CMLL. It also means that the AAA product that fans know and love will likely be irrevocably altered, as the company becomes a feeder system for WWE. The idea wouldn't have such a morbid tone if not for the woefully tone-deaf storyline that former AAA star Rey Fenix has been absorbed into.
Initially, a battle between Chad Gable's El Grande Americano character and Rey Mysterio over the insulting way Americano treats the history of Lucha Libre. When Mysterio was injured, Rey Fenix took his place, lost, and even pulled AAA star El Hijo Del Vikingo into the mix. While there is still time for Fenix, Mysterio, and the stars of AAA to get their revenge at Worlds Collide in June, as it stands, fans of Lucha Libre would be right to feel punched in the mouth by the goings-on of WrestleMania 41 weekend.
Iyo Sky is proof that a genuine worker can still find fame and fortune in WWE. Bianca Belair is a capital-C Character who always seems to have more than enough momentum to hop into the main event. Rhea Ripley is possibly one of the biggest female stars in WWE history at this point. But Iyo Sky just wrestles better than either of them.
While there is a lot of ways WWE is stuck in the past, Sky becoming the first Asian superstar to win a match at WrestleMania was a long-overdue bit of progress. That her victory came at the expense of two of WWE's biggest female stars, if not biggest stars in general, makes the win all that much sweeter. Sky has always been something of a sidekick in factions like Damage CTRL, so seeing her take center stage in such a thrilling win easily pushed her into the stratosphere of the women's division.
Also winning one of the best matches of the weekend is a nice feather in her cap. The weekend was a truly mixed-bag quality-wise, but all three women brought a tremendous amount of energy and drama to the card.
Look, I know that WWE needs to keep moving forward and have plans for after its biggest show of the year, but man did this weekend need a Tables, Ladders, and Chairs Match. There will be a TLC Match on Friday, but that's Friday. They clearly didn't have time for whatever madness DIY, The Motor City Machine Guns, and the Street Profits could conjure in WWE's most entertaining stipulation; after all, they needed time for "Stone Cold" Steve Austin's salute to reckless driving.
The fact that the middling World Tag Team Championship match between The New Day and The War Raiders got WrestleMania time was just salt in the wound. They weren't snubbing the tag division in general, just the one with the most exciting teams. It just feels like a complete miss. I'm sure the "SmackDown" fans will be grateful for what is sure to be a great match, but it still left a gaping hole in the weekend that no match was able to fill.
Dominik Mysterio is WWE Intercontinental Champion. The young Mysterio has come a long way from being his dad's smiley sidekick, and now he heads into the rest of 2025 carrying the title his father held proudly. But that's not all.
I already said that the WWE acquisition of AAA is bad for Lucha Libre fans in general, but this does open up an opportunity for Mysterio to appear in a promotion once thought impossible for the WWE star. The Mysterio legacy isn't just in WWE. It's also in AAA. Add in Mysterio's many tributes to Eddie Guerrero and he feels tailor-made for whatever the WWE/AAA partnership will look like. A genuine WWE star with a genuine link to AAA. It is not impossible that he will be a bridge in this new era.
Even still, the win alone is enough to solidify Mysterio as more than a nepotism hire. His rise through WWE's rankings has been steady and doesn't seem to be stopping anytime soon.
Cody Rhodes is now on year number two of his beef with The Rock being passed off to someone else. First Roman Reigns, and now JohnCena. Despite even getting the chance to wrestle The Rock, like Night 1 of WrestleMania 40, it never seems like Cody manages to get his hands on The Rock when he needs to most.
Rock was the catalyst for John Cena's heel turn at Elimination Chamber, making Rock's absence from WrestleMania 41 glaring. Even if he shows up on "Raw," and said this is all according to plan, he still seems to have left Travis Scott and John Cena holding the bag, narratively speaking. We still aren't 100% clear on how Cena, Scott, and Rock all fit together, meaning Cena heads into his 17th world title run rudderless, while Cody simply looks like a geek. I could say that everyone involved is a loser, but Cena is world champion, Travis Scott is forever the star of "Aggro Dr1ft," and that leaves Cody Rhodes as the guy who got nothing out of this other than a story to finish.
Although this time that story is much, much dumber.
