WWE Superstar Roman Reigns is certainly one of the top competitors in the company right now and has been on a solid run as the WWE Universal Champion, but he is losing his top spot to two WWE Smackdown women. Roman Reigns successfully defended his WWE Universal Championship against WWE Hall Of Famer Edge and Daniel Bryan in a triple threat match in the main event of Night Two of WrestleMania 37. Roman Reigns might also be losing Paul Heyman eventually.
Roman Reigns also successfully retained his WWE Universal Championship against Cesaro in the main event of WrestleMania Backlash. Roman Reigns was scheduled to defend his WWE Universal Championship against Rey Mysterio at the WWE Hell In A Cell pay-per-view. However, that match was shifted to a previous episode of Friday Night Smackdown.
Roman Reigns would successfully defend his WWE Universal Championship against Rey Mysterio as well and went on to defeat Edge and John Cena in subsequent title matches at WWE Money In The Bank and WWE SummerSlam respectively.
Roman Reigns recently spoke to Mike DeStefano of Complex, where he was asked if he considers AEW as competition. He made it clear that is not the case whatsoever.
“No. I mean, not for me personally. This is one of those subjects that’s very subjective and there’s a lot of passion and tribalism that really sways and creates an unbiased opinion. But I can only speak from my perspective. I’m one of those guys who will compete at anything. Like, ‘I bet you I can eat that cookie faster.’ I want to be the best at anything that I choose to do. We pull up on lawn mowers, we cut the yard in half, I’m going to beat you. My side will look better than yours. So me, I don’t see the real competition [with AEW] because I think their fan base legitimately is a hardcore fan base. So there’s like a ceiling and a built-in ground to that viewership. [The WWE is] trying to connect with everyone. We’re trying to connect with the mainstream. We’re trying to pull in the casual fan. We’re trying to engage the new viewer, while also servicing our hardcore fan base and give them compelling stories to fulfill them as well. I don’t know if I’ve said it before, but I’ve said it before, when the audience is probably the biggest character in your show, that’s strange to me. You’ll hear it all the time, the reviews and the comparisons. I think because they are the new kids on the block, they’re the cool kids in town I guess because of how premature and how novel it kind of still is, I think there still being babied by these hardcore wrestling fans. Which is fine. That’s great. I don’t think anybody’s going to ever, especially from a performance standpoint say, ‘Oh no, there’s more opportunities out there? That sucks.’ So it’s not a bad thing. It’s a great thing for professional wrestling. It’s just a weird argument because there’s so much bias and there’s so much, ‘I’m on this side and I’m not gonna open my mind to the other side.’ And it goes both ways.”
Reigns continued by saying, “As far as competition, not to me. There might be some other people on our roster who maybe think they need to dig deep and get better as a performer and what they do out there at the art form, but there’s nobody in the whole world, any other promotion, in WWE…I’m better at this art form than everybody else. And I stand on that. That’s the totality of it. I’m not just talking about, ‘Oh, his spots are so good and he counters real well.’ That stuff don’t mean anything to me. When you tally it all up, nobody touches me in this business.”
