John Cena says Gunther’s story is not finished, and that the harder part of it starts now that there are no more legends left to retire.
Cena was asked on WrestleRant whether he had kept track of Gunther since their match, and said he watches everyone.
“I’m always watching everybody, and opportunity is just a way to get you another opportunity,” Cena said.
On Gunther specifically, he framed it as a question of what happens when the opponent is not a name.
“His story’s not done. I think he’s in that position right now where he’s making moves based on the equity of Gunther,” Cena said. “And sometimes you don’t get a dance partner that’s equal or greater to you. Sometimes you don’t get a 25-year veteran like AJ Styles to make him retire, or sometimes you don’t get to retire John Cena.”
He said the answer to that is a different set of jobs.
“Sometimes you’ve got to lift up younger talent. Sometimes you’ve got to hold the show by yourself,” he said.
Gunther built the run that got him here on ending careers. He made Goldberg pass out in July 2025, beat Cena in his retirement match at Saturday Night’s Main Event on December 13, 2025, and choked out AJ Styles at the Royal Rumble in Riyadh on January 31 in a match with Styles’ WWE career on the line. He spent the weeks between the Cena and Styles matches on Raw reminding people about the first one, which is what drew Styles in.
The year since has been the part Cena is describing. Gunther came out of the Styles match without a championship, lost the Undisputed WWE Championship feud with Cody Rhodes, and by the summer had moved into a programme with SmackDown General Manager Nick Aldis after going off on him backstage following a loss at Night of Champions. That match happened at SummerSlam and was Aldis’ first in a WWE ring. Gunther has since been working SmackDown without a title picture, including an impromptu match with Matt Cardona on the August 14 show.
That drop has been read as a booking failure rather than a story. Bryan Alvarez said WWE dropped the ball by taking a wrestler who had just retired three legends and putting him opposite a general manager. Styles, asked about it on his own podcast, said it was fair to say, and added that he would rather beat himself to death in the ring than write television.
Cena’s answer is the other reading of the same stretch. Nobody left on the roster carries what Goldberg, Cena and Styles carried into those matches, and his argument is that the next phase of Gunther’s run is supposed to look different because of it. Lifting younger talent and carrying a show without a marquee opponent is the job he is describing, and it is not one that produces the same headlines.
Styles has separately made the case that Gunther is the one thing WWE’s title picture does not have. He argued that the top programmes are being built between wrestlers the crowd likes, that neither the Rollins and Reigns pairing nor the Punk and Rhodes pairing has a clear heel in it, and that Gunther is a hated heel in a company short of them.
There is one detail in Cena’s answer worth separating out. He described Gunther as making moves on the equity of Gunther, which is a way of saying the character is now the draw rather than the opponent. That is the position Cena himself occupied for most of his career, including the 13 years he spent away from the WrestleMania main event, and the argument he made about his own run in the same interview was that a spot on a card is a chance to build something rather than a reward. He is applying his own standard to somebody else’s booking.
Cena has not wrestled since the Gunther match. He hosted WrestleMania 42 in April and works as a WWE ambassador.
