WWE SummerSlam 2025: Biggest Winners & Losers

SummerSlam 2025 has come and gone. For the first time ever, the summer supercard stretched over two nights, essentially becoming the WrestleMania of the summer. The show was full of moments, matches, highs, and lows, all of which have been documented on the results page, as well as our Loved and Hated column. It’s now time to break down the winners and the losers.

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

I need to be clear. SummerSlam 2025 was a banner night for Brock Lesnar. He made a triumphant return to WWE, following the main event of SummerSlam, even getting dubbed “Mr. SummerSlam” in the process. His reception from the crowd was explosive, and he’s going to get one last shot at John Cena before Cena retires. His return also marks a win in the form of WWE legal clearing the controversial star of being any kind of business liability. On the shallowest, most basic 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 both sides against the middle. 

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

Despite being cleared by WWE legal, Lesnar is still 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 part of his contract negotiations with WWE, backed up by screenshotted text messages, which is why McMahon and the rest have been accused of sex trafficking by Grant. For the last two years, the company has decided that any possible pop from the crowd would not be worth the black cloud that Lesnar’s allegations would bring to the company. WWE and Lesnar crossed the Rubicon on Sunday, essentially deciding that the heavily-touted “SummerSlam Moments” were more important than any bad vibes that supporting someone currently involved in active 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 former Undisputed WWE Champion’s retirement tour, clearly sensing that to take any true credit for Lesnar’s return would 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 no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you 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 have to put one in the win column. 

Before Brock Lesnar sent everything sideways on Sunday, Cody Rhodes and John Cena had the match that everyone kinda wished they’d had at WrestleMania. It was a glorious cartoon spectacle; two titans of the wrestling world battling to see which of them is the more outsized persona. Rhodes and Cena pulled out all the stops, kicked out of all kinds of super finishers, and Rhodes came out on top, ready to lead this company for the next decade. 

Rhodes’s win was electric, the crowd was on fire, Cena looked thoroughly impressed and humbled, they shared some kind words, shook hands, and then Cody got the hell out of Dodge. There’s a lot of heat on the ending of SummerSlam, as I just wrote, and literally none of it is on Cody Rhodes. Considering his history with Lesnar, I have no doubt he will cross paths with the cursed legend at some point, but you really do have to hand it to “The American Nightmare” for sneaking out of the finale of SummerSlam at 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 is worth its weight in gold these days.

It’s a smart move. The company as a whole cannot shake the decision to bring back Lesnar, but Rhodes is exactly the kind of aloof company man who can pull off the “well, aw shucks, I was just celebrating with the title, I didn’t know about that” that will be required in the weeks following SummerSlam, at least until he inevitably wrestles Brock at the Saudi Royal Rumble.

At this point, I would completely believe that Karrion Kross has been an experiment by Miami University to see if you can make a wrestler solely out of social media hype and some jiujitsu training, and the results have been a pretty firm “Maybe?”

I don’t usually like to give such a literal definition of a loser, but losing a match that was reportedly only on the show because they had an extra slot is like the textbook definition of a loser.

Kross certainly seems to be an unkillable presence in wrestling. Just when you think the fanbase has completely rejected him and WWE has given up, they give him something else to do. Kross has spent the summer basically needling Sami Zayn about how he’s not “world champion material” and he needs to find his own Dark Passenger, kinda like if Dexter Morgan were a fan of the show “Dexter” instead of a serial killer. Sami Zayn thoroughly beat Kross at SummerSlam, and now Kross is going to have to hang out backstage some more, waiting for someone else to neg. He’s kind of like the Pick-Up Artist: Brazenly confident, antagonistic to the point of parody, and generally, kind of an intense loser. It’s like Kross is trying to cut the same “You’re not as good as you think you are” 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 up to fail, quite frankly. All of the talk about how good he’s been in training, and all of the hype for the match, pretty much put it on Jelly Roll’s shoulders to deliver something, anything, that could compare to the likes of Bad Bunny or Logan Paul. While he wasn’t quite the athlete those two men are, Mr. Roll certainly 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 is not controversial to say that WWE is not necessarily a match-first company, which meant that Jelly Roll didn’t need to do a 450 Splash or anything ridiculous, he just had to give some offense, take some offense, and mug for the camera, and Jelly Roll seemed to “get it” in a way that many trained wrestlers don’t. It might sound like a low and ridiculous bar, but Jelly Roll stands alongside the likes of The Rizzler when it comes to knowing his role and not doing anything more than needed. Jelly Roll delivered some facial expressions that belong in 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 the crazy stuff while Randy Orton and Drew McIntyre focused on the fundamentals. 

This business is only hard if you make it hard, and everyone involved in 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 going on over on “SmackDown.” That is as damning an indictment as I’ve ever written about a storyline.

Outside of an occasional Jimmy Uso run-in, the Bloodline has essentially become a Ship of Theseus, with almost the entirety of the faction replaced with new people, and now all those people hate each other. 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 end of a marathon of violence. There was literally nothing they could hope to accomplish that could 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 become numb to the whole thing. Sikoa, easily the least interesting part of the situation, has been a central figure in this Pacific Islander power struggle for far too long. It is borderline criminal that Jeff Cobb doesn’t have anything better to do than be muscle.

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