Do WWE wrestlers always lose in their hometowns?

It’s 2019, and WWE is coming to Boston. You look at the poster, and who do you see but Boston’s own Sasha Banks? You’re excited to go see some live wrestling and to support your hometown girl, but your friend just shakes his head and sighs at you.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” he says. “Vince always has the hometown wrestlers lose.”

It’s a classic McMahon trope. You distinctly remember Sasha Banks losing the Raw Women’s Championship to Charlotte Flair in Boston a few years back. To your memory, The Revival never win in North Carolina. Heck, even as a non-wrestler, you could count on Jim Ross getting embarrassed every time WWE visited Oklahoma back when he was the lead commentator.

So, there it is. WWE wrestlers always lose in their hometowns. Someone else said it, so now you just have to believe it.

Now that we’re a few years removed from Vince McMahon’s time as the head of creative in WWE, I decided to revisit that thought. Last year, I investigated whether or not Money in the Bank holders really lose all of their matches before they cash in. The year prior, I tried to see if AEW wrestlers got opposite momentum from wins on go-home shows before pay-per-views. Both of these beliefs were repeated within wrestling fan circles, but through researching them, I discovered that the truth was a bit more nuanced than the common sentiment.

Even though I do remember a lot of wrestlers losing in their hometowns back when Vince was in charge, how egregious was it, really? Perhaps more importantly, in the two years since Triple H took over WWE creative, have hometown wrestlers done any better?

The rules

The thing about “hometown” wrestlers in WWE is that kayfabe sort of extends to where the wrestler is from. For example, when Undertaker and Shawn Michaels fought at WrestleMania 25, the bout was touted as being in Michaels’s home turf of Texas, though Undertaker still entered the ring hailing from Death Valley. However, this particular WrestleMania was held in Houston, the actual hometown of the Undertaker, while Shawn Michaels’ billed hometown of San Antonio is a four-hour drive south.

For the purposes of this analysis, I’m basing the wrestler’s hometown status on whether or not they are billed as being from the area that the show is in. For example, Charlotte, North Carolina, native R-Truth is a hometown hero whether the show is in Charlotte, Raleigh, or Greensboro, as that’s how WWE portrays it.

This sounds simple enough, but as I spent hours researching this topic, I noticed that I needed a few more rules for clarity’s sake. Each of the following rules is named after the wrestler(s) that brought the potential issue to my attention.

The Revival Rule: A tag team comprised of two wrestlers from the same town still counts as two losses. A Revival loss in North Carolina, since both men are from Asheville, does affect the scales more than a New Day loss in Atlanta, where only Xavier Woods is from.

The Elias Rule: Elias was one of 29 losers in the 2018 Royal Rumble, was the only person in the match from Pennsylvania, and was eliminated 15th, without too much fanfare. I don’t think it makes sense to single this out as a loss for Elias, so as such, I decided not to count Rumble or battle royal losses against hometown wrestlers, though I would count victories for them. (If that last bit doesn’t sit right with you, I will say that I do not recall a single battle royal winner in this list, so functionally, I didn’t count battle royals at all.)

The Natalya Rule: All Canadians are in their hometowns the moment WWE heads up north.

The McIntyre Rule: All wrestlers from the United Kingdom are in their hometown when WWE is in the UK, regardless of which country in the UK they’re in. This becomes especially important during Triple H’s WWE, but I will say that Finn Balor, Becky Lynch, and Sheamus are all excluded from the McIntyre rule since they’re from Ireland, not the UK’s Northern Ireland.

The Miz Rule: This is the most consequential one: wrestlers involved in this research project can only have one hometown. The Miz is known as being from Cleveland, Ohio, but every time he’s come out to play during this four-year span, he has been billed as being from Hollywood, California. As such, I only count the Miz as a Californian, not as an Ohioan. This affects a few wrestlers, such as Dolph Ziggler (billed from Hollywood, Florida, not Cleveland, Ohio), Kalisto (billed from Mexico City, not Chicago), and Kofi Kingston (from Ghana, West Africa, not Boston, Massachusetts).

I’d be lying if I said I watched every single wrestling match I counted on this list just so I could hear what the announcer said during the wrestler’s entrance, so I did use two more rules of thumb to support the Miz Rule. First, I count the hometown that the wrestler had for the majority of the timeframe. Nia Jax, for example, recently represented Australia during the 2025 Royal Rumble, but for most of her time in WWE, she’s been billed as being from San Diego, California, and I counted her as such throughout.

And if all else fails, my other rule of thumb was to ask myself the question, “What does WWE 2K24 say?” For example, LA Knight only appears on the main roster during the Triple H years, but I wasn’t sure whether to count him as being from Hagerstown, Maryland, or Los Angeles, California. WWE 2K24 clarifies that LA is officially from LA, so I counted him as a Californian the one time that this issue came up.

As for the timeframes, I initially thought about comparing Triple H’s first two years to Vince’s last two years, but then I remembered that, with Vince’s exit taking place midway through 2022, Vince’s last two full years in charge were pandemic years. To avoid writing almost exclusively about winners and losers from Florida, I decided to look at Vince McMahon’s pre-COVID years of 2018 and 2019 and to compare them to Triple H’s 2023 and 2024. I looked at every Raw, SmackDown, and PLE from these four years, the venue of the show, and the wrestlers on the shows. Here are my findings.

Vince McMahon, Year 1: 2018

In 2018, hometown wrestlers won 37 matches, lost 41 matches, and got 1 draw—this last note coming as Florida’s own Bo Dallas fought to a no-contest when the B-Team took on the Revival in August.

Though 2018 does end with more losses than wins for home turf wrestlers, it’s not as one-sided as common wisdom would have you think. There were some notable hometown losses here, like Sami Zayn losing in Montreal in April, or Dean Ambrose losing a title match in Cincinnati in November. On the other hand, Super Showdown in Australia saw every Australian wrestler on the card win their match, with Buddy Murphy winning the Cruiserweight Championship on the show.

Wins such as those are the reason I made two pie charts for each year, with one only including raw wins, losses, and draws, while the other has weighted wins and losses, accounting for the nuance of some of these victories and defeats. A win or loss in one’s home state does matter, but seeing as this is a “hometown” list, I emphasize these genuine hometown wins and losses by counting them twice on a weighted list. Similarly, when the hometown hero wrestles in a title match, that win or loss is also counted twice. And, in scenarios where the wrestler wins or loses a title match in their exact hometown, the additional points stack, meaning the result is counted 3 times.

With this in mind, here are the weighted results from 2018:

The notable results from this time include the following:

• Hometown wins for Bayley (San Jose, 2/12), Alexa Bliss (Columbus, 9/3), and Ember Moon (Dallas, 9/17)
• A home state title defense for AJ Styles (Georgia, 10/30)
• A hometown title win for Buddy Murphy (Melbourne, 10/6), which is weighed twice
• Hometown losses for Rhyno (Detroit, 3/12 AND 12/31), Sami Zayn (Montreal, 4/30), and Mickie James (Richmond, 5/28)
• A hometown title match loss for Dean Ambrose (Cincinnati, 11/24), which is also weighed twice

While home state wrestlers still garnered more losses than wins in 2018 using weighted stats, not only did the difference between these two stats shrink, but looking solely at direct hometown victories, hometown wrestlers won seven of the eight matches counted, with Murphy’s title win and Ambrose’s title loss balancing each other out.

Vince McMahon, Year 2: 2019

After one year of booking where Vince’s Superstars fared about average at home, 2019 saw a sharp increase in wins for hometown and home state wrestlers. Out of 76 recorded matches, 44 wrestlers won at home, while only 32 lost.

On some of these nights, Vince was incredibly generous, like the February 26 edition of SmackDown, on which the Hardy Boyz scored a win in North Carolina, and Charlotte-native R-Truth defended his United States Championship in front of his hometown crowd. Other nights, Vince lived up to his supposed reputation. On the June 11 edition of SmackDown, Hollywood’s Miz beat Elias before losing to both Drew McIntyre and Shane McMahon, garnering one win and two losses in the same night.

Despite some outliers, 2019 generally saw a lot more victories than losses for hometown heroes, and the wins seem to mean a lot more than the losses, when weighted.

Some of the more important victories during 2019 include the following:

• Hometown wins for R-Truth (Charlotte, 2/26), Kurt Angle (Pittsburgh, 3/11), Sasha Banks (Boston, 3/25), Baron Corbin (Kansas City, 5/27), Bobby Roode (Toronto, 8/12), Xavier Woods (Atlanta, 9/17), Mansoor (Riyadh, 10/31), Mustafa Ali (Chicago, 11/24), and Carmella (New York City, 12/20)
• Home state title match wins for Daniel Bryan (Washington, 6/23) and the Revival (North Carolina, 9/15)
• Hometown title match wins for R-Truth (Charlotte, 2/26), Zack Ryder and Curt Hawkins (New York City, 4/8), and Drew Gulak (Philadelphia, 7/14), all of which got counted twice
• Hometown losses for Bayley (San Jose, 6/10), The Miz (Los Angeles, 6/17), Cedric Alexander (Charlotte, 9/15), Baron Corbin (Kansas City, 10/25), and Mustafa Ali (Chicago, 11/22)
• Home state title match losses for Braun Strowman (North Carolina, 9/15) and Bayley (California, 10/6)

Among the wins included in the charts above are four victories which are actively controversial, as they abide by an extra rule I didn’t explain earlier, “The WrestleMania 29 Rule.” See, dating back to that event, whenever WWE has a show in MetLife Stadium—which is in East Rutherford, New Jersey—WWE will instead note that the show takes place in “The New York metropolitan area.”

As such, I ruled that, in kayfabe, WrestleMania 35 was in New York and was booked as such. Looking at Tony Nese’s Cruiserweight title win, Zack Ryder and Curt Hawkins’ Raw Tag Team Championship win, and Carmella’s battle royal win — all on the pre-show to hype up the crowd — you could be forgiven for thinking that this WrestleMania was taking place in the heart of New York City.

If you look at the stats above, I do include all four of these victories in the data, and on the weighted list, Nese, Ryder, and Hawkins are all counted twice (though I don’t count any of them as being in their exact hometowns). If you don’t agree with this methodology, I do have separate raw and weighted stats included below which remove these four wins from the record.

So, in 2019, hometown wrestlers won 58% (or 56%) of their matches, with substantial wins bringing it up to 63% (or 60%). Either way, Vince McMahon had wrestlers win closer to two thirds of their hometown matches this year, which fully goes against the preconceived notion I had about hometown wrestlers always losing.

Now that we’ve dissected two full years of McMahon’s booking, let’s see if Triple H has handled his homecomings any better or worse.

Triple H, Year 1: 2023

In Triple H’s first full calendar year as head of creative, wrestlers who having homecoming matches won 27 times, lost 26, and had two draws, with those last two non-finishes coming from Canada’s Trish Stratus on August 14 and Salt Lake City’s own Zoey Stark on September 18.

Something I quickly noticed was that the number of hometown matches in general dropped significantly from McMahon’s WWE, with there being 79 and 76 hometown matches in 2018 and 2019, respectively, while Triple H’s first year only had 55 hometown matches.

One reason for this decline may be that Triple H’s roster is simply much more international than Vince’s. The likes of Rhea Ripley, Bronson Reed, and Grayson Waller are lucky if WWE has a TV show in Australia in a given year. None of the three members of Imperium — Italy’s Giovanni Vinci, Germany’s Ludwig Kaiser, and Austria’s GUNTHER — are likely to find themselves wrestling in their home country, outside of house shows. Even Finn Balor, Becky Lynch, and Sheamus never really get to wrestle in Ireland, even for house shows. (Seriously, the November 10, 2019, house show in Dublin doesn’t have any of these three wrestlers on it, which isn’t even part of my data, but that’s wild, right?)

On top of this international roster excuse, there are three more points against Triple H’s booking in this regard. First, there are many instances where WWE is in someone’s hometown, but they’ll just miss the show entirely. For example, Triple H’s WWE is surprisingly light on wrestlers from Texas, so it catches my eye when Raquel Gonzalez misses a whole tour of WWE TV shows in the state, only to wrestle on the very next show on the other side of the country.

The second point is that, just looking at the pie chart above, you can see that Triple H’s hometown wrestlers just barely eke by with more wins than losses. This is more forgivable, as it feels disingenuous to suggest that Hunter is a bad booker because there’s about a 50/50 chance that a wrestler wins a match in their hometown, but when we look at the weighted stats for this year, things flip.

The notable wins in 2023’s weighted stats include:

• Hometown wins for Angelo Dawkins (Cincinnati, 1/18), Damien Priest (NYC, 2/13), Carmella (NYC, 2/13), Montez Ford and Mustafa Ali (Chicago, 4/24), Bad Bunny (San Juan, 5/6), Chad Gable (Minneapolis, 8/7), Edge (Toronto, 8/18), and Johnny Gargano (Cleveland, 12/11)
• A home state title win for Bianca Belair (Tennessee, 1/2)
• The aforementioned hometown draw for Zoey Stark (Salt Lake City, 9/18)
• Hometown losses for Top Dolla (D.C., 3/3), Solo Sikoa (Los Vegas, 3/24), The Miz (Hollywood, 4/1 AND 4/2), and Damien Priest (NYC, 5/29)
• Home country title match losses for Edge (Ontario, 2/20) and Elton Prince (London, 6/30)
• Hometown title match losses for Sami Zayn (Montreal, 2/18), Kit Wilson (London, 6/30), and Montez Ford (Chicago, 11/23)

Looking at that list, there are a lot of hometown wins, but when it came to title matches, everyone wrestling in their hometown lost, with only Knoxville’s Bianca Belair winning a match in Nashville. With heavy losses for Zayn, Wilson, and Ford, and no feel-good hometown title wins to balance it out, the 49% winning record from the raw stats became a 49% losing record with the weighted stats.

Triple H, Year 2: 2024

In 2024, hometown wrestlers won 25 matches, lost 17, and had one draw, with AJ Styles’ January 19 match in Atlanta ending in a no-contest thanks to Solo Sikoa. On the whole, this was a much better year for wrestler homecomings than 2023, though a 58% win rate is the exact same record that hometown wrestlers had in Vince McMahon’s 2019 (or is only 2% higher, if you go with the revised stats that don’t include WrestleMania 35).

Last year, WWE had a whole lot of international shows, which especially helped wrestlers from Canada and the UK. However, these international shows also highlight more strange absences and loss stats.

For example, Elimination Chamber 2024 was held in Australia, and though Rhea Ripley was in the show’s main event, Bronson Reed and Grayson Waller did not wrestle. Waller did, at least, host a high-profile talk show with Cody Rhodes and Seth Rollins, but Reed was left off the card entirely.

Indi Hartwell, however, did make the Elimination Chamber pre-show, though she and tag partner Candice LeRae found themselves in the rare, embarrassing situation of losing back-to-back tag matches in each partner’s homecoming, losing in Indi’s home country of Australia before losing in Candice’s home state of California two days later.

All that said, the weighted stats for 2024 only slightly differ.

The notable wins this time around are:

• Hometown wins for Nia Jax (San Diego, 1/1), Damien Priest (4/1), and Natalya (Calgary, 9/9)
• Home state and country title match wins for Roman Reigns (Florida, 1/27), Rhea Ripley (Australia, 2/24), Sami Zayn (Canada, 7/6), LA Knight (California, 9/20), and Jey Uso (California, 9/23)
• Hometown title match wins for Sami Zayn (Montreal, 4/15) and The Unholy Union of Alba Fyre and Isla Dawn (Glasgow, 6/15)
• Hometown losses for Dominik Mysterio (San Diego, 1/1) and Naomi (Orlando, 8/16)
• Home state and country title match losses for Kayden Carter (Florida, 1/26), Jey Uso (California, 2/19), Indi Hartwell (Australia, 2/24), Piper Niven and Drew McIntyre (Scotland, 6/15), Logan Paul (Ohio, 8/3), and Ludwig Kaiser (Germany, 8/30)
• A hometown title match loss for Johnny Gargano (Cleveland, 8/2).

This year, it looks like Triple H cared a bit more about getting stars on shows in their hometowns, but this resulted in a lot more wrestlers defending or challenging for championships during their homecomings and losing those big matches. Clash at the Castle was a 50/50 show for Scotland natives, as was Elimination Chamber for Australians (since Nia Jax only counts as a Californian due to the Miz Rule). Regardless of whether it’s a 58% or 57% win rate, hometown wrestlers still did incredibly well in 2024 under Triple H’s direction.

Conclusion: WWE hometown wins, Vince McMahon vs. Triple H

At the beginning of this project, I had two questions: “Did hometown wrestlers lose a disproportionate amount in Vince McMahon’s WWE?” and “Does Triple H do any better than Vince McMahon in that regard?” This would have been the part where I tried to define what a “disproportionate amount” looks like under McMahon’s management, but now that we have all of the stats, it turns out that we don’t even need to worry about that. At least between 2018 and 2019, hometown wrestlers won more than they lost.

As for whether or not hometown wrestlers fare any better in Triple H’s current regime, it does look like they do, though the difference is fairly negligible, with Triple H’s wrestlers winning 53% of the time as opposed to Vince’s 52%. The biggest visible difference between the two bookers is that Triple H had hometown wrestlers have a few more draws and no-contests.

To me, the real story is in the weighted averages.

Looking at the weighted matches — the direct hometown matches and the title matches — wrestlers actually did better in Vince McMahon’s years than they do now under Triple H. Again, it’s not by much 55% vs. 52%, but Triple H still had a higher percentage of hometown losers than Vince did, and that’s with Triple H using more draws.

Now, this result only looks at the latest of late-stage Vince McMahon booking. Ideally, we’d also look from June 2022 backward and average out the wins and losses of wrestlers in McMahon’s WWE going back to the 1980s, to get the fullest idea of Vince’s booking patterns for hometown stars. However, since I was comparing Vince’s booking against Triple H, it made sense for this article to only look at the two years we have of Triple H’s booking against the most recent two-year streak of McMahon booking I could find.

However, having watched WWE full-time in 2018 and 2019, I still remember talking with other fans about wrestlers losing in their hometowns, and I remember thinking that my bias was confirmed by what I was seeing on TV. Looking back and knowing that it was much more 50/50 in nature goes against my assumptions and even goes against what I thought I was seeing during my research. Early in 2018, there were a lot more losses than wins, so for the rest of my time tracking the wins and losses for Vince, I still maintained the belief that Vince was burying the hometown talent, even as the numbers and letters on my spreadsheet showed me a much more complex narrative.

This is why looking at the actual numbers matters. I don’t know for sure that Vince McMahon historically had hometown wrestlers win 52% of their matches, but I have successfully challenged a firm belief I’d held as a younger wrestling fan who watched a lot of the shows.

The key takeaway here is that you can’t simply accept random factoids from other fans without question. No, you don’t have to spend days looking back at old wrestling cards and making pie charts, but the next time someone tells you that Xavier Woods always eats pinfalls in New Day matches, or that Cody Rhodes has to hit three Cross Rhodes to win title matches, maybe take that with a grain of salt. And if the mood does strike you, go ahead and check the numbers!

AIPT Science is co-presented by AIPT and the New York City Skeptics.