WWE has been trying to make Saturday Night's Main Event a thing for the past year, and it has fallen flat. Sure, it's been used as the platform for Goldberg's retirement match as well as the culmination of John Cena's retirement tour. But outside of those two tentpole events, the event does little to advance storylines, which can be problematic when it takes place a week before one of the company's biggest events of the year.
The build to the Royal Rumble has already been a snooze fest. Superstars randomly announcing their entries, Drew McIntyre's first WWE championship feud with Sami Zayn only having one week, CM Punk seemingly having no opponent, and the event taking place in Saudi Arabia likely impacting the surprise element of the show.
All reasons why Saturday Night's Main Event needed to be a strong showing. Instead, it fell flat.
Saturday Night's Main Event added to the laundry list of problems WWE is facing ahead of the Royal Rumble.
Cody Rhodes vs. Jacob Fatu has always felt like a waste of programming. Sure, WWE is smart enough to offer reasons why it's a feud — Fatu costing Rhodes the championship — but it felt like a booking that bought the company time to determine the path to Wrestlemania 42. The match should have had a stipulation, but instead, a brawl took place before the bell could ring and not much was resolved.
Sure, the two could cross paths during the Royal Rumble on Saturday, but it feels like WWE left the door open to pivot to another direction.
Even the Women's Tag Team championship match left very little resolve moving forward. As is the case with Rhodes, it seems like WWE is mailing it in with Rhea Ripley being in the tag team title picture.
From a technical wrestling standpoint, AJ Styles vs. Shinsuke Nakamura was excellent. If Styles truly is retiring on Saturday, then the moment with Nakamura last weekend was well deserved.
As for the main event, there were several angles WWE could have gone with, but they arguably went with the worst one in having Zayn win the match.
Considering WWE was also competing with Alex Honnold climbing Taipei 101 live on Netflix, they needed something to keep fans' attention, and it was a forgettable night.
It doesn't bode well for the Royal Rumble on Saturday, which has had virtually no build. Perhaps the go-home episodes for Raw and SmackDown change that feeling, but the creative issues with WWE only seem to be getting worse.