The Heels, the Faces and the Rivalries: The Backstory You Need Going into WWE’s ESPN Debut with Wrestlepalooza

The era of WWE on ESPN begins this weekend, as ESPN serves as the United States provider for the WWE event known as Wrestlepalooza. If you’re a regular ESPN viewer who’s rarely (or never) watched WWE, you might be a bit lost about what’s going on – especially given WWE’s ongoing, soap opera-style storylines – but we’re here to help with the backstory you need going into Wrestlepalooza.

Wrestlepalooza will stream exclusively on the ESPN App in the United States for ESPN Unlimited Plan Subscribers, beginning a new partnership with ESPN to air all of WWE’s monthly Premium Live Events, or PLEs, in the US.

WWE is a world of heroes (AKA babyfaces, or faces) and villains (heels), long-term rivalries, big twists, and bitter betrayals. Whether a title is on the line or not, it’s a world where the most bitter and personal of feuds has only one reasonable path towards resolution - stepping into the ring for a wrestling match against your enemy to settle things.

So let’s go over the basics, starting with what the heck a PLE actually is and how the five matches at Wrestlepalooza got their start.

What’s a PLE?

PLE stands for Premium Live Event, though for decades the typical term was PPV, or Pay-Per-View, until that terminology – and the mode of individually purchasing these events – became mostly outdated, as WWE moved their programming to streaming platforms.

Essentially, at least once a month (but these days, it can be a couple of times), WWE has a special weekend event where a bunch of their current storylines lead into several big matches for various rival wrestlers. Sometimes, this can serve as the epic conclusion of a long-running feud, though the amount of PLEs we get these days mean it might just be one notable encounter in the midst of many others, or a more one-off encounter.

The most notable PLE is WrestleMania each spring, which WWE treats like their Super Bowl, and often will serve as the true conclusion to a storyline months – if not years – in the making. Others of note include SummerSlam (held in August), Survivor Series (held in November) and the Royal Rumble (held in January), though any PLE has the potential to create a memorable match or a big moment, such as a long-awaited return or a shocking betrayal. And with the ESPN deal beginning, WWE is putting a ton of hype and investment into Wrestlepalooza beyond what you’d see for your usual monthly PLE.

Wrestlepalooza’s New Beginning

Wrestlepalooza is a brand new entry to WWE’s PLE rotation, though there is some history to the name. In the late 1990s, the now-defunct wrestling promotion ECW introduced the name Wrestlepalooza, using it four times. Eventually, WWE would purchase ECW’s assets, so they’ve owned the Wrestlepalooza name for over 20 years, but this is the first time since 2000 that it will actually be used for a new wrestling event.

THE MATCHES

Women’s World Championship Match:

Iyo Sky vs. Stephanie Vaquer

This one involves a pretty notable swerve from the original plans, due to real life events intervening. The most recent Women’s World Champ, Naomi, was in the midst of summer storylines and rivalries with both Iyo Sky (fighting to get the title back after Naomi defeated her for it) and rising star Stephanie Vaquer, who’d earned a championship match at the Evolution PLE. But with Naomi then needing to forfeit the title due to her real life pregnancy, Iyo and Vaquer will now face each other at Wrestlepalooza to determine who will be the new champion moving forward.

This isn’t your typical heel vs. face situation, as Iyo and Vaquer are going into this match showing a lot of mutual respect, even shaking hands on this week’s RAW, but look for a possible wild card here in the form of Asuka. Sky’s increasingly volatile and angry friend and ally (and one half of the tag team the Kabuki Warriors, alongside Kairi Sane), Asuka’s been intervening even when Sky doesn’t want her to of late, so it wouldn’t be too surprising if she played an unofficial role in this match or its aftermath.

The Usos vs. Bron Breakker and Bronson Reed

Twin brothers Jey Uso and Jimmy Uso were highly successful tag team partners for years before splitting off for solo careers. Jey has been particularly popular in the time since, with fans going crazy for his high energy entrance through the crowd, and he recently had a run as World Heavyweight Championship. In the midst of losing his title, Jey’s had multiple encounters and matches with Bron Beakker and Bronson Reed in recent months, who are both members of the heel faction known as The Vision (alongside Seth Rollins; more on him soon). When Breakker and Reed attacked Jey, Jimmy came to his rescue, leading to the two once more joining forces as tag team partners – even if temporarily – to face Breakker and Reed at Wrestlepalooza.

Keep in mind, the Usos storylines in recent years had them frequently turn on one another, which included a long term rivalry and multiple matches between them, with Jimmy in the heel role. Could this new reconciliation be a ruse, setting up another brotherly betrayal? Or for the time being at least, are the Usos really back on the same page?

Mixed Tag Team Match:

World Heavyweight Champion Seth Rollins and Women’s Intercontinental Champion Becky Lynch vs. CM Punk and AJ Lee

It might not be the technical main event, but the match that’s gotten the most attention in recent weeks has to be this showdown between two real life married couples - mainly because it serves as the return match for AJ Lee, someone it seemed would never return to wrestling at all, much less the WWE.

The rivalry between CM Punk and Seth Rollins has been ongoing, with ebbs and flows, ever since Punk made his own surprising return to WWE in 2023, after he left under particularly bitter circumstances back in 2014. It heated up once more this summer when WWE mainstay Rollins used his “Money in the Bank" contract – won at the PLE of the same name, allowing the winner of the Money in the Bank match to challenge a champion at any time, without warning – to quickly defeat an exhausted Punk for the World Heavyweight Championship mere moments after Punk had just won the title in a grueling match. But the situation escalated when Rollins’ wife, the equally accomplished Becky Lynch, attacked Punk mid-match when he was on the verge of winning the title back from Rollins, putting Lynch and Rollins together as onscreen allies (now both operating as heels) after their storylines have been kept separate more often than not.

This set the stage for Punk to bring in his own ally to even the odds - his real life wife, AJ Lee. Lee’s return is a legitimately huge deal for fans, because she’d retired from wrestling a decade ago and seemed especially unlikely to ever come back, as she moved into a successful career writing books, comics and screenplays. An especially beloved and influential figure in women’s wrestling history, Lee’s return has been incredibly well received, with a ton of excitement generated as she and Punk challenged Lynch and Rollins to face them at Wrestlepalooza. So far, Lee has joined her husband for some typically funny and biting promos against Rollins and Lynch, but on Saturday, she’ll finally compete in a match again.

Undisputed WWE Championship Match:

Undisputed WWE Champion Cody Rhodes vs. Drew McIntyre

In the past month, heel Drew McIntyre and the popular Cody Rhodes got into a post-match brawl that turned uglier when McIntyre hit Rhodes with Rhodes’ own title belt, before sending Rhodes through the announce table (a time-honored tradition in wrestling). In the storyline, this caused Rhodes to need a couple of weeks off to recuperate, though in actuality, Rhodes was off filming his role as Guile in the new Street Fighter movie.

Then just last week, McIntyre’s attack on Rhodes’ friend, Randy Orton, sent a returning Rhodes to the rescue - and to then challenge McIntyre to face him at Wrestlepalooza, with Cody’s title on the line. This is a situation where a title-based feud is rather new and it’s hard to tell yet if it’s going to be a short term storyline that serves as a bit of a mini-feud, or instead leads to something more ongoing for the two participants.

Main Event:

John Cena vs. Brock Lesnar

Even if you’ve never watched wrestling, you probably know who John Cena is. And even after his career took off in Hollywood, Cena has always kept at least a toe dipped into WWE, jumping in and out for different periods of time between his other movie and TV work making peace and moving fast and furious. However, he announced that 2025 would serve as his retirement year for wrestling, and he’s appeared pretty consistently throughout the year on WWE programming to make the most of it, including at many of the PLEs.

Though there was a detour into briefly trying to have the perpetual hero Cena become a fiendish heel – which started out exciting and then quickly petered out – the main thrust here has been to give Cena a bit of a Greatest Hits approach to his final year in the ring. That’s included matches against notable foes from the past, which is where Brock Lesnar comes in. Lesnar’s genuinely intimidating presence is now interwoven with a genuinely controversial dynamic, thanks to his ties to the real life scandal and allegations around ousted WWE founder Vince McMahon. But after a two-year absence, Lesnar returned to attack Cena at SummerSlam last month and set up their Wrestlepalooza match.

Cena and Lesnar both rose to stardom around the same time two decades ago, and there is a lot of history between them, including a 2014 match in which Lesnar absolutely decimated Cena, making him look unusually helpless and helping to boost Lesnar’s unstoppable beast aura in the process. With the clock ticking on Cena’s final run, this is probably the last time these two men face off, depending on how they book Cena’s last few appearances.

Wrestlepalooza will debut live from Indianapolis for ESPN Unlimited subscribers on Saturday, September 20 at 7:00pm ET / 4:00pm PT.