On January 28, 2018, the WWE will hold its first ever 30-Woman Royal Rumble at their annual pay-per-view event, The Royal Rumble. This is a historic first for the promotion which has done a lot in the past couple of years to emphasize the athleticism and talent these women put on display day after day for the WWE. As a whole, it may even be argued that on certain events, the women’s match(es) on the card are the highlights of the event. This is especially true when you have women like Asuka, Charlotte Flair, Sasha Banks, Becky Lynch, or Naomi in the ring. And that’s just the women from the main roster. The women over on NXT have made it a habit to constantly steal the show when they perform – especially at the NXT TakeOver events.
However, the WWE does have one small dilemma when it comes to the Women’s Royal Rumble in that it doesn’t have 30 women on their main rosters of WWE RAW and SmackDown Live. When you take the women’s rosters from both RAW and SmackDown, you only have a total of twenty-one women to utilize in the match. But even then, it is expected that the two Women’s Champions from each brand (Charlotte Flair & Alexa Bliss) would be excluded from the match as the winner of the match would then decide which one of the two champions they would want to face at WrestleMania 34. So, that drops the number of women down to nineteen.
Which leaves the WWE creative and booking teams the tasks of trying to fill in the remaining eleven spots with other female performers. Without a doubt, they will certainly be utilizing some of the women from their developmental brand of NXT, but I don’t think that they will fill every remaining spot with NXT performers. I think that the WWE will pull out a few surprise entrants to really piqué the interest of the fans. And that is what I want to talk about in this article. I want to try and predict how the WWE will book the matches female entrants. I’m not trying to predict the winner of the match – though I do believe that Asuka will ultimately win the match – but rather I am trying to guess at what the WWE will do and who they will use to fill out the 30-woman field for this historic match. So, let the break down begin…
If you take all the women on RAW’s roster, with the exception of Alexa Bliss, who is the current WWE RAW Women’s Champion, you have with the following ten women eligible to participate in the Women’s Royal Rumble:
- Alicia Fox
- Asuka
- Bayley
- Dana Brook
- Mandy Rose
- Mickie James
- Nia Jax
- Paige
- Sasha Banks
- Sonya Deville
And then if you take all the women on SmackDown’s roster, with the exception of Charlotte Flair, who is the current WWE SmackDown Women’s Champion, you have the following nine women eligible to enter the Women’s Royal Rumble:
- Becky Lynch
- Carmella
- Lana
- Liv Morgan
- Naomi
- Natalya
- Ruby Riott
- Sarah Logan
- Tamina
That means that with the full roster from both RAW and SmackDown, you have a total of nineteen women eligible to enter the Women’s Royal Rumble. So that means that you can take a few women from WWE’s developmental territory, NXT – with the exception of NXT Women’s Champion Ember Moon. (Though I wouldn’t be surprised if she did enter the Women’s Royal Rumble as a fan favorite.) As such, if it were me booking the match, I would want to include the following women, mainly because I feel that they will be the ones most likely to get called up to WWE’s main roster sooner rather than later:
- Billie Kay
- Kairi Sane
- Nikki Cross
- Peyton Royce
- Sage Beckett
- Shayna Baszler
So, now that puts the roster of women participating in the Women’s Royal Rumble up to twenty-five. That means you still have five spots available to be filled by surprise entrants in the match. And I think I have a good feeling who the WWE may utilize to fill out the roster for the match to a full thirty women. I’m pretty sure that a couple of former WWE female competitors will be included. I also have a feeling that the “Billion Dollar Princess” may interject herself into the match as well. (Because we all know the McMahons love being the center of attention within the WWE.) And I’m pretty sure that we all know that a former UFC female champion will participate as well, so let me list them out for you below:
- Beth Phoenix
- Nikki Bella
- Rhonda Rousey
- Stephanie McMahon
- Trish Stratus
And that is how I believe the WWE will fill out the thirty-woman roster for the first ever Women’s Royal Rumble. If they utilize the full women’s roster from WWE RAW, the full women’s roster from SmackDown Live, a few stars from NXT, and a couple of nostalgic and surprise entrants available to the WWE, then this is what I believe the field of thirty women will look like come January 28. Sure, I know this is not what the field of thirty women will look like, but I have a good feeling that most if not a majority of my selections here will make appearances at the event. WWE could certainly throw in a number or surprise entrants that I haven’t thought of, and it would be awesome if they managed to entice a number of female wrestlers from other promotions around the world, or some that they have employed on a match-by-match basis, but if they stick to what is familiar to them and what is arguably a predictable pattern of booking for the WWE, this is the most likely scenario I can think of for the Women’s Royal Rumble.
Still, imagine if they could call on top female talent like Blue Pants, Candice LeRae, Deonna Purrazzo, Io Shirai, Laurel Van Ness, Princesa Sugehit, Rachel Ellering, Santana Garrett, Tessa Blanchard, or any number of other talented women from around the world – that would certainly be entertaining, surprising, and interesting; but highly unlikely. Still, it’s a nice thought…
*Photos and video courtesy of WWE.com.
