On This Day in 2016: AJ Styles vs John Cena at SummerSlam 2016 is a five-star classic

Ten years ago, WWE presented one of the most complete in-ring arguments for a single performer’s greatness that the company has ever produced. AJ Styles and John Cena at SummerSlam 2016 wasn’t just a great match — it was a credential. Styles had spent years being the best wrestler on whatever roster he stood on, and now he was doing it on the biggest stage WWE offers in the summer, against the man who had functioned as the company’s gravitational centre for over a decade. When the dust settled, it earned five stars, and nobody who watched it seriously argued the rating was wrong.

The same night carried a different kind of weight. Finn Bálor won the Universal Championship — a title that was brand new, carrying none of the accumulated history that makes a belt feel real — and then had to vacate it almost immediately due to injury. The cruelty of that timing is something the Reality Era specialised in: a moment that should have been purely celebratory, immediately complicated by circumstance. Bálor never got the proper reign that win deserved, and the Universal title spent years searching for the legitimacy that a healthy Bálor run might have given it from the start. Meanwhile, the women’s division was also given meaningful space on that card with Sasha Banks, Becky Lynch, and Charlotte Flair involved — a signal that the post-brand-split WWE was at least trying to distribute its equity more broadly.

What SummerSlam 2016 ultimately represents is a snapshot of WWE operating at genuine creative altitude while simultaneously fumbling the execution of its own new infrastructure. Styles versus Cena is the kind of match that justifies a career — both of them, frankly — and it holds up because it was built on craft rather than spectacle. The Bálor situation is the asterisk that follows the evening everywhere, a reminder that professional wrestling has always been as much about what doesn’t happen as what does. Great matches and broken momentum on the same card isn’t a contradiction in this business — it’s basically the definition of it.