It was a suitably romantic night Sunday in the City of Love, as the French crowd delivered one of the biggest receptions so far in 2025 for John Cena at WWE Clash in Paris. Who can blame them, given how brilliant Cena’s final European match was?
What made it so special? The crowd certainly played a part. For longstanding WWE fans, it was a given that a country known for its enthusiastic audiences was going to bring their A-game to a PLE in the heart of their capital city. Even so, did anyone really expect them to be that loud when applauding this weekend’s John Cena entrance?
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Finally, the whole “John Cena suuuucks” routine was left in the dust.
It also helped that Cena and Logan Paul exceeded expectations when it came to their match. Again, this wasn’t a total surprise — anyone who watched more than five minutes of Paul in the ring would have anticipated he’d pull out all the stops to mark the moment. But did you imagine we’d see a 48-year-old Cena go as hard as he did, hitting a Code Red, Styles Clash and End of Days within a single match, and still leaping around like a man half his age afterward?
Even the ending of the match felt almost perfect, as “Big Match John” scored a clean victory that still presented the upstart heel as a worthy contender. Listening to the crowd cheer their hero to the rafters, you knew WWE had hit the sweet spot. By the time the camera showed Cena posing with the now-infamous “John Cena kid” — the young fan who went viral after ending up on the receiving end of a caustic promo in Brussels — some of us had tears in our eyes.
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Maybe some sadness is apt, given we have only nine dates left before Cena hangs up his boots. But there’s also something bittersweet about the whole thing, especially when you think about how we could have had these kinds of special moments much earlier (and much more regularly), if only WWE had some sense back in February and March.
It feels almost churlish to litigate the whole Travis Scott fiasco again. But when you look at the sheer joy so many get from watching a 30,000-strong crowd seeing Cena back at his best, you have to wonder what possessed WWE to think that “dark Cena” was ever a good idea in the first place. Surely these kinds of moments are worth more than a hundred instances of heel John Cena scoring another dusty victory over an underdog opponent?
When the great Paul Heyman was interviewed on “The Ariel Helwani Show” three weeks ago, he defended the Cena heel run by citing the “what if?” question — i.e. that it was better that we’d seen how Cena looked as a bad guy instead of being left pondering the question for eternity. Yet after what we just watched in Paris, I think you have to contemplate a very different hypothetical: How good could things have been if WWE had given us this iteration of Cena for the entirety of the year?
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You could have still had the all-important 17th title reign, of course. But you could have done it in a way that allowed crowds to actually celebrate him breaking that record. Hell, if you wanted to really get them on their feet, you could have even had the big milestone come at the expense of Paul, who could have easily made a plausible world champion in the run up to WrestleMania 41, before dropping the belt to Cena later on.
Who knows, maybe that sense of injustice will fade and WWE will give us such a spectacular finale to this retirement tour that we’ll forget that we ever heard the phrase “ruin wrestling.” If nothing else, this afternoon suggests we shouldn’t entirely dismiss the possibility.
As for what’s next for Cena, we all know the answer to that question, with a match against Brock Lesnar all but confirmed for Wrestlepalooza in Indianapolis. Any reunion between two of the greatest icons in modern wrestling would always come with big expectations, but after what Cena achieved Sunday afternoon, they just got that little bit bigger.