Royal Rumble

The Royal Rumble is a professional wrestling event, produced since 1988 by WWE, a professional wrestling promotion based in Connecticut. It is named after the Royal Rumble match, a battle royal whose participants enter at timed intervals. The event is held in late January, the week before the Super Bowl. After the initial event was broadcast as a television special on USA Network, the Royal Rumble has been shown on pay-per-view (PPV) and is one of WWE’s “Big Four” PPVs, along with WrestleMania, SummerSlam, and Survivor Series.

History

Event

The Royal Rumble is a pay-per-view consisting of the Royal Rumble match, title matches, and various other matches. The first Royal Rumble event took place on January 24, 1988, and was broadcast live on the USA Network. The following year, the event started to be broadcast on pay-per-view and thus became one of WWE’s “big four” pay-per-views, along with WrestleMania, Survivor Series, and SummerSlam.

The men’s Royal Rumble match is usually located at the top of the card, though there have been exceptions, such as the 1988, 1996, 1997, 1998, 2006, 2013, and 2018 events. Due to the Rumble match taking up a large amount of time (most Rumble matches last roughly one hour), the Rumble event tends to have a smaller card than most other pay-per-view events, which routinely have six to eight matches per card. The 2008 Royal Rumble was the first WWE pay-per-view to be available in high-definition. The 2018 Royal Rumble was the first to include a women’s Royal Rumble match, which was the main event for that year; it is now standard for the event to include a men’s and women’s match. Since 2019, the Royal Rumble has been usually held in baseball stadiums.

Match

The Royal Rumble is based on the classic Battle Royal match, in which a number of wrestlers (traditionally 30) aim at eliminating their competitors by tossing them over the top rope, with both feet touching the floor. The winner of the event is the last wrestler remaining after all others have been eliminated. According to Hornswoggle, who worked for WWE from 2006 until 2016 and participated in two Rumbles, participants may learn their eliminations by knowing the two wrestlers who are eliminated before them and which wrestlers are entering the Royal Rumble before and after their elimination.

Dates, venues, and winners

Video box set

In March 2007, WWE released a complete DVD box set titled Royal Rumble: The Complete Anthology, which showcases every Royal Rumble event in its entirety, up to the 2007 Royal Rumble.