WWE spent the better part of a year building Gunther into the most unstoppable force in professional wrestling, having him retire John Cena, put away Goldberg, and defeat AJ Styles. Then they apparently had no idea what to do with him next. Now, with SummerSlam two weeks out and a Nazi salute going viral from his entrance at MSG, the Gunther conversation is louder than it’s been in months — and not entirely for the right reasons.
WWE Built the Perfect Monster and Then Left Him Standing in the Rain
AJ Styles admitting publicly that WWE may have dropped the ball with Gunther after those three massive retirement-level victories is a remarkable thing to hear from someone who was on the losing end of one of them. When the guy you just beat is going on his podcast to say “yeah, we probably wasted that,” you have a credibility problem. Three legends. Three wins. No title program immediately following. It defies logic from a storytelling standpoint, and it’s the kind of decision that decades from now will be cited as a textbook example of momentum mismanagement. Gunther is not a hard character to book — he’s cold, he’s brutal, he’s elite — and yet WWE somehow made him feel like a transitional figure rather than a destination. The Nick Aldis SummerSlam match is intriguing on paper, but it arrives feeling more like a course correction than a natural story progression.
The Nazi Salute Incident Is Not a Gunther Problem — But It’s Still a WWE Problem
Let’s be clear about what happened at Saturday Night’s Main Event: a fan in the crowd made repeated Nazi salutes during Gunther’s entrance, a video went viral, and now it’s attached to one of WWE’s featured performers heading into their second-biggest show of the year. This is not Gunther’s fault. His character has never courted or endorsed anything of the sort, and the suggestion that it has would be deeply unfair. But WWE does have a responsibility question to answer here about crowd management, arena security response time, and how quickly incidents like this are addressed before a phone camera turns them into a news cycle. The broader wrestling internet has enough bad-faith actors who will use this to muddy the waters around a performer who doesn’t deserve the association. What WWE cannot do is stay silent about how they handle situations like this going forward — a clear, firm public statement about the incident and their security protocols isn’t optional, it’s necessary.
The SummerSlam Ticket Problem Is Bigger Than a Justin Jefferson Promotion Can Fix
Twenty-seven thousand tickets distributed for a venue that holds over thirty-one thousand, with prices dropping and a promotional tie-in to a Vikings wide receiver needed to move paper — this is not where WWE wants to be two weeks out from SummerSlam. The two-night format is partly to blame, and AJ Styles is right to question whether the experiment qualifies as a success. Splitting a premium live event across two nights sounds good on a quarterly earnings call, but it functionally dilutes the feel of the occasion for fans making travel decisions. Minneapolis is not a wrestling hub the way New York, Los Angeles, or even Cleveland has been for these major shows, and a stadium that size demands either a red-hot local hook or a card so loaded that people fly in specifically for it. The Justin Jefferson angle is clever marketing, but you cannot discount-promotion your way to a sold-out SummerSlam and then claim the model is working. At some point the product on paper has to be enough of a draw on its own.
Chris Jericho Challenging Ciampa With Old Characters Is Either Genius or a Desperate Swing
The report that AEW stars are bringing back old characters — specifically Jericho issuing a challenge to Tommaso Ciampa at Redemption 2026 in a form that presumably resurrects something from his past — is the kind of story that requires real scrutiny before you applaud it. On one hand, Jericho has more recognisable personas than almost anyone in wrestling history, and leaning into that theatrical identity-shifting is very much on brand for him. On the other hand, “bringing back old characters” as a creative device can be a crutch — a way to generate a short-term pop of nostalgia without doing the harder work of building something new. Ciampa is one of the better pure character workers in the industry, and a feud with Jericho has genuine potential, but only if the execution is grounded in the present rather than dressed up in whatever coat Jericho wore in 2009. The proof will be in how AEW frames it on television, not in the announcement.
Avery Styles at GCW Is the Most Quietly Interesting Story of the Week
Nobody is going to write the thinkpiece about AJ Styles’ son wrestling Marcus Mathers at GCW Rude Awakening during SummerSlam weekend, but they probably should. The independent scene during SummerSlam weekend is genuinely one of the best stress tests for a young wrestler — it’s a knowledgeable, often unforgiving crowd that will see through anyone coasting on a famous surname without the goods to back it up. Avery Styles choosing GCW rather than a softer landing pad says something about either his confidence, his advisors’ confidence, or both. His father’s recent candour on his own podcast — openly critiquing WWE’s booking decisions and the SummerSlam format — suggests the Styles household is not one that does things purely for optics. If Avery can hold his own in that environment, this weekend becomes a genuine coming-out moment; if he struggles, the discourse will be twice as loud because of whose name he carries.
The throughline connecting almost everything this week is the gap between potential and execution — Gunther’s momentum that wasn’t capitalised on, a SummerSlam that isn’t selling itself on the strength of the card alone, a Jericho nostalgia play that could go either way, and a young Styles stepping into a room that will tell him exactly where he stands. Wrestling has always been a business that generates its own friction, but right now WWE in particular seems to be manufacturing unnecessary obstacles for its own biggest stories. Gunther versus Aldis at SummerSlam should feel like a revelation. Whether it does will depend entirely on the two weeks of television that precede it — and based on recent form, that is not a comforting thought.