Ranking every WWE Royal Rumble PPV in history

Here are the rankings for every WWE Royal Rumble pay-per-view event in history.

On the 30th anniversary of the first WWE Royal Rumble, we thought it would be a good to go and take a look back at every single Royal Rumble pay-per-view event in history. A couple of things here to start. First, I am completely aware that the inaugural event in 1988 was not a pay-per-view. However, we’re still going to include it here so let’s not get in too much of a twist about that. Secondly, we’re not just looking at the Royal Rumble itself here. The goal here is to look at the entire card from top to bottom and THEN rank the event. I just wanted to be clear on that from the beginning.

So how exactly did I put these rankings together? Well, it actually was quite difficult. It’s extremely rare that any pay-per-view doesn’t include a bad match. It’s just very hard to do. So with that, I had to decide exactly how bad the match really was and if there was any entertainment value to it all. In the same manner, I had to take the good matches and decide if they overshadowed the bad matches enough to make the night a success. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. Then there’s the great matches. Sometimes a great match has the ability to fully take away the feeling from a bad match or two and make the event worth watching. Having a great Royal Rumble match certainly helps in that aspect of things.

I could go ahead and write the algorithm down for you if you like (I seriously didn’t do that) but let’s not waste any more time. From 30 down to 1 (I seriously just now see the hilarity of doing it that way given the fact that the Royal Rumble match goes from 1 to 30), here are the full rankings for every single Royal Rumble pay-per-view event in history. Enjoy.