The year is 2026.
Wrestling fans like me remember the good old days exactly as we choose to remember them. The crowds were louder. The wrestlers were tougher. Entrance themes could solve global conflicts. Everything was better.
Call me a gatekeeper if you like.
I probably deserve it.
But WWE’s current King and Queen of the Ring format is a bit rubbish.
And that’s frustrating because King of the Ring should be one of the easiest concepts in professional wrestling.
A tournament.
One wrestler.
One path.
One crown.
Simple.
Instead, WWE has somehow spent forty years perfecting the idea before deciding to make it worse.
King of the Ring Begins
The original King of the Ring tournament arrived in 1985.
Foxborough, Massachusetts.
Fourteen tournament matches took place before the evening’s WWF Championship main event involving Hulk Hogan.
Don Muraco defeated The Iron Sheik in the final and became the first official King of the Ring.
The early tournaments weren’t televised. They were house show attractions designed to sell tickets and give fans something special.
Then no tournament in 1990.
They were fun, but there was always a limitation. Everything happened in one night. The bracket moved quickly. Wrestlers barely had time to breathe.
Still, they had one thing modern King of the Ring occasionally forgets.
Every match was one-on-one.
You beat somebody.
Then you beat somebody else.
Then you beat somebody else.
Eventually you became king.
Funny how that works.
The Bret Hart Evolution
The 1991 tournament was a strange one.
The Undertaker entered the bracket but never actually lost.
Instead, he and Sid Justice fought to a double disqualification in the quarter-finals.
Professional wrestling, ladies and gentlemen.
By 1993 WWE had found the solution.
King of the Ring became a pay-per-view.
The opening round took place on television weeks beforehand. The quarter-finals, semi-finals and final took place on the PPV itself.
Suddenly the tournament felt important.
Bret Hart won the inaugural PPV edition after defeating Razor Ramon, Mr Perfect and Bam Bam Bigelow on the same night.
That mattered.
Because Hart could legitimately claim he had survived the bracket.
The tournament wasn’t simply decoration.
The tournament was the story.
1994 followed the same formula.
1995 did too, although it remains notable for Mabel defeating The Undertaker before eventually winning the entire thing.
A sentence that still feels slightly surreal in 2026.
Austin 3:16 and the Perfect Format
For me, 1996 remains the blueprint.
Only the semi-finals and final appeared on the PPV card.
Everything else happened beforehand on television.
You got weeks of build-up.
You got meaningful matches.
You got a tournament that felt prestigious.
And you didn’t completely exhaust the roster in a single evening.
More importantly, it gave us perhaps the most famous King of the Ring moment ever.
Steve Austin defeats Jake Roberts.
Steve Austin delivers the Austin 3:16 speech.
Professional wrestling changes forever.
Again, all achieved through one-on-one tournament wrestling.
Because of course it was.
What else would it be?
The Golden Years
1997?
Same format.
1998?
Same format.
1999?
Quarter-finals returned to the PPV.
2000?
Same.
2001?
Earlier rounds on television. Final on PPV. Edge defeats Kurt Angle.
2002?
Same again.
Brock Lesnar wins.
For the first time the winner earns a SummerSlam world title opportunity.
Lesnar goes on to defeat The Rock and become WWE Champion.
Perfect.
Then WWE shelved the entire event.
A shame, really.
Did Brock Lesnar ruin this too?
The Revival Years
King of the Ring returned in 2006.
No longer a PPV.
Instead, a SmackDown-exclusive tournament.
All matches happened on television except the final, which took place at Judgment Day.
Booker T won.
King Booker was born.
One of the greatest post-tournament character reinventions WWE has ever produced.
Again, the formula worked because it respected the tournament.
Every match mattered.
Every victory mattered.
Every wrestler had to beat the person standing opposite them.
The Weird Years
2008 might genuinely be the strangest King of the Ring ever.
Eight wrestlers.
One random episode of Raw.
William Regal.
The Raw General Manager.
ECW’s CM Punk.
Five SmackDown wrestlers.
Two Raw wrestlers.
One ECW wrestler.
A tournament that somehow felt both good and terrible at exactly the same time.
2010 stretched things over two episodes.
2015 gave us quarter-finals on television before moving the semi-finals and final onto the WWE Network.
Odd.
But still a proper tournament.
Still one-on-one.
Still respectable.
2019 finally brought back a full 16-man bracket.
Spread across a month.
The final happened on Raw rather than a premium event, which was disappointing.
But at least it felt like a genuine tournament.
The Next Era
2021 saw the introduction of Queen’s Crown.
Queen of the Ring is one of the best developments WWE has introduced in years.
If you’re going to crown a king, crown a queen too.
Simple.
The problem is what WWE has started doing to both tournaments.
2024 looked promising.
Sixteen wrestlers.
Traditional bracket.
One-on-one matches.
Television build.
Finals at Night of Champions.
Then came 2025.
And the wheels came off.
Fatal Four-Ways Are Not Tournament Wrestling
Apparently somebody in WWE creative looked at a perfectly functioning tournament and asked:
“How can we involve more wrestlers with less time?”
That should never be the question.
The question should be:
“How do we make King of the Ring as good as it can possibly be?”
The 2025 and 2026 format opens with Fatal Four-Way matches.
Why?
Seriously.
Why?
Two wrestlers from each match can effectively be eliminated without ever being pinned.
A wrestler can lose the tournament despite not being involved in the finish.
That is nonsense.
The entire prestige of King of the Ring comes from the journey.
The old format allowed winners to say:
“I beat everybody put in front of me.”
The new format says:
“I won a few matches in a tournament involving fifteen other people and never wrestled most of them.”
That isn’t the same thing.
Not remotely.
It’s tournament wrestling reduced to a speedrun.
The wrestling equivalent of skipping straight to the boss fight because you couldn’t be bothered playing the level.
The Better Solution Already Exists
Want more stars involved?
Extend the tournament.
Run it from WrestleMania through to SummerSlam.
One match a week.
Maybe two.
Let rivalries emerge naturally.
Let underdogs build momentum.
Let fans become invested.
Bring in NXT.
Bring in AAA.
Bring in TNA.
Make the thing feel enormous.
The roster is bigger than ever.
WWE has more television than ever.
The company literally has too many platforms.
Time is not the issue.
Patience is.
Instead, WWE has chosen efficiency over prestige.
The result is a tournament that feels smaller despite involving more wrestlers.
A strange achievement when you think about it.
One Final Complaint
And since we’re already standing on the porch yelling at clouds…
Can we talk about where the finals keep happening?
Saudi Arabia.
Every year.
For both King and Queen of the Ring.
Now, without turning this into an international relations lecture, there is something undeniably strange about WWE presenting a tournament celebrating female monarchy in a country whose historical relationship with the concept is, shall we say, complicated.
The optics remain bizarre.
The contradiction remains obvious.
And WWE continues to march forward as if nobody notices.
The Crown Still Matters
Despite all my complaints, I still love King of the Ring.
That’s probably why the current format annoys me.
The tournament gave us Bret Hart.
It gave us Austin 3:16.
It gave us King Booker.
It gave us Brock Lesnar’s launch towards WWE SummerSlam glory.
It has produced some of the most important moments in wrestling history.
That’s why watching it become a collection of Fatal Four-Ways feels a bit like watching Godzilla reduced to directing traffic in a supermarket car park.
Technically it’s still Godzilla.
But surely we’re capable of aiming higher.
Anyway.
Enough old man shouting at cloud energy from me.
I’ll be watching the next bracket.
I’ll be reading the latest WWE Raw results.
I’ll be checking the WWE SmackDown results.
And I’ll still care who wins.
I just wish they’d let them earn the crown properly.
doragon sports 