Did the western world just suddenly go back to pretending wrestling is "real" for some reason?

This isn’t an achievement. Why is this in my sports news next to last night’s hockey scores instead of next to an article about who was the bitchiest on the lastest episode of Real Housewives?
Because wrestling is a huge business and it has a lot of overlap with combat sports fans.
Like…of course he did. It’s the storyline. It’s quite literally “in the script”.
Yesn't.
An actor breaking the record for most best performer oscars won in a career would also be newsworthy, yet you can absolutely pay your way to an oscar.
John Cena is remarkable in that he's such a draw that a multi-billion dollar organization decided to set his career as the new ceiling to break for the next big star, by breaking a record untouched for decades, might I add. That's newsworthy.
That isn't scripted, that is a performer being skilled at what he does, as much as I personally don't enjoy his work.
But I thought at some point they steered into the whole “entertainment” aspect when most of us grew the hell up and clued into the absurdity of it all.
This is like, the most "I learned something so the rest of the world learned it with me" I've ever seen.
Wrestling has been known to be fake for over a century; newspapers stopped reporting on it as a factual sport in the early 1900s.
Hell, it was known to be fakery before it was ever televised.
Kids don't know until they do.
It's live action martial arts anime theater. No more, no less.
tl;dr: Should John Cena's record-breaking 17th title win be in the papers? absolutely. Sports section? Maybe, depends. It is a "sport" in the same way that figure skating or synchronised swimming is.

It's a soap opera with fighting. Of course fans are talking about the characters and the story. Nobody talking about anything that happens in a soap Opera will add that it's just fiction, they're talking about the events.

I wouldn't be surprised if it's a load of bots because Netflix spent the GDP of a small country on it.

People are excited about the writting in the show they watch. 90 banillion articles came out about Severence too.
People that are fans then play into the kayfabe, as thats a large part of the point of the show.
Let people enjoy things, they arent harming you by talking about wrestling.

We've regressed into believing a lot of imaginary things are real.
Wrestling is the least of our worries.

It's a soap opera for men. Sure the storyline is made up, but people still like being entertained.
Note, I am assuming the match was good. I haven't watch wrestling in a while, but some of those old matches are still fun to watch.
- I've heard the soap opera comparison before. But I think "circus" is technically more accurate. You've got these very obvious professional athletes performing a well-rehearsed routine that is physically demanding and dramatically delivered.
  Like, would you call a tightrope walker or a trapeze artist "fake"? If a dozen clowns pile out of a car and start performing back flips and somersaults and climbing into human pyramids and spraying one another with seltzer bottles, would you dismiss it as an obviously scripted display?
  Would you go to a Harlem Globetrotters game and complain when they pull out a springboard and start doing stunt slam dunks?
  It's a show! It doesn't need to be competitive in order to be fun.
  
  Yeah from a physical aspect yes you are correct but wrestling has the storylines that the circus doesn't. The Jerry springer like drama and feuds that people really get invested in with the same level of chair throwing.
  
  Would you go to a Harlem Globetrotters game and complain when they pull out a springboard and start doing stunt slam dunks?
  I did, so Ethan "Bubblegum" Tate made fun of me, I became verbally abusive, and then they asked me to leave.
  
  The outcome of the match is predetermined while the participants pretend that it isn't. That is why there are constant arguments about whether or not it's "fake".
  
  Circus comparison is good but I prefer drag race. It's a bunch of (generally) men in costumes and make up performing very well-practiced routines for the sole purpose of entertainment, with one rigged winner at the end.
  Maybe wrestling fans wouldn't like that comparison as much.
- I think you can leave off “for men”
  
  Facts.
- Meh, it was okay I suppose.
  Cena doesn't play a heel very well, and it's kind of shitty that they used crotch shots in both of the WM main events.

Living in the western world - I hear nothing about Wrestling..
- Same. US defaultism strikes again. I don't think I have ever heard anyone talk about wrestling in my life
  
  I live in the US and also never hear about wrestling.
  
  Nah, at least this once it's definitely not a US defaultism thing.
  As an American, this is the first time I've thought about pro wrestling in a very very long time.
  
  Wrestling has a significant presence in Central America, Japan, and Europe. Presumably other regions as well but I really don't follow the sport so my experience is all second-hand.
  
  it's not a point of US defaultism, it's that nobody in our respective social circles can give a shit about wrestling lol
- Yeah, I think this says more about OP's information bubble.

Who cares? Let people enjoy it if it makes them happy.

Wrestling is a form of theatre.
Its just the high octane, sensationalized, ridiculous, coked up, american pop culture version of Theatre.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnvSs3HEz2o excellent video where someone talks about why Wrestling got popular
Wrestling Isn't Sports. But it also isn't fake. Not entirely. the outcomes are usually scripted, and theres a card they are usually following (Sometimes, they aren't. Whether its a botch, a shoot, etc) (botch means a mistake, a shoot means someone's not acting, and they're throwing real punches)
but the acrobatics and "stunts' people are doing, are very real. an incredible amount of effort and skill is needed to have the physical ability and timing to make the stuff look real for the kids and cameras
thats why its called sports entertainment,
- I think OP is specifically asking why Pro Wrestling is being treated like it's real in some sports publications.
- Just to further your point. It's like Cirque du Soleil, scripted, but they are really doing those moves.
  
  Makes me wonder how 'real' roman gladiators were.

I mean people get excited over TV shows all the time? Doesnt have to be real for people to talk about it and be excited

WWE is less wrestling and more a glorification vehicle for the MacMahon syndicate. All the real pro wrestling is on AEW or the circuits now.

What outlets do you follow?
Because this is the first I'm hearing about it.

Counterpoint- all sports are silly. That’s why they are called games.
I don’t dunk on wrestling fans anymore because people are free to enjoy whatever they want. But it’s always been like this. It didn’t change - you did. Personal growth!
- I agree to some extent, but there's an important difference between sport and performance. WWE is categorically separate from say, BJJ. Sure, they both have guys rolling around on the floor, and they're both kinda silly, but one is a real competition with rules and skill while the other is a predetermined show.
  
  Okay, so as a teenager I was a super nerd and got into swords. I took olympic style fencing lessons first, then got into the ren faire and also did some stage combat. Sadly, I have health problems and I couldn't keep my knees in place, and had to quit. The difference between those is probably the same difference between WWE style wrestling, and BJJ. One is done with choreography, one is a competition.
  They're both sports. I don't understand why people think the choreography somehow means it doesn't have skills or rules? It was the same skillset, different rules. Stage combat was unpadded and used heavier weapons that left more bruises when we fucked up the choreography. They're different, sure, but the amount of overlap is underappreciated.
  
  there’s an important difference between sport and performance
  Sure. Namely, that sports tend to be "competitive" while performances tend to be entirely about spectacle. But to claim that Simone Biles is a Real Athlete while Britt Baker isn't, because one of them does her leaps and tumbles and flexibility stunts at Olympic sanctioned events and the other does it during AEW matches... you're really ignoring the substance for the pastiche.
  What one might argue "ruins" wrestling is all the phoney accolades various performers receive. Claiming you're "The Best Wrestler" in a staged performance is meaningless, because its clearly a scripted fight. At the same time, very few people showing up to a nationally televised event are anything less than exceptional in athletic talent. And the exceptions are primarily there for their exceptional comedic talents.
  
  not disagreeing with you - I find performative "wrestle drama" absolutely, mind numbingly pointless. my preference is to participate in (and ocassionally watch) unscripted combat sport.
  however... I have trained competitive martial arts for decades (muay thai, bjj, others) and most of these "wrestling" participants are pretty skilled athletes. it takes training to turn combinations of techniques designed to injure into something reasonably harmless. there is a pretty fine line separating sparring from a fight.
  I know you know this, but its still useful to remember that these players are actors as well as athletes and that can obviously be pretty inviting for a lot of viewers.
  
  I don't think all sports need to be contests, that's just the most common association people have. Surfing and rock-climbing are still sports even if you never enter a competition.
  
  Yes that's the reality. I was just rage baiting meatheads for fun. Tee-hee. Nobody's perfect.
- Not all sports are games, if you cant quickly grab some friends and head out to play it, its not a game.
  
  All sports are games. Not all athletic competitions are sports.
  
  That's not the definition of a game, though.
  Loads of games need co-ordinated access to specific resources, from chess to the 2001 release of Halo. Doesn't mean they're not games.
  The line between games and sports is entirely arbitrary, and changes from person to person.
  
  Yes I know. Real sports have “motor” in front of them. lol

WWE is a special beast. They embraced The Internet a lot earlier than most media and their social media and astro turfing game is on point. It is why you'll hear that every single wrestler on the planet's life goal is to be in the WWE Hall of Fame (TM) and why Roman "The Rock's Cousin Who Was Such A Charisma Void That All His Lines In Hobbes And Shaw were cut" Reigns and whoever the hell is the greatest story ever told on television (TM) and so forth.
Spend a bit of time discussing wrestling and you rapidly realize you are talking to a "bot" in that different statements trigger the exact same response from different people.
So it is less that The Fans think that cena taking time out of his busy schedule of caping for a rapist sex trafficker was truly amazing and more that people on twitter and PR folk on The Subreddit told them to think that and they are repeating it.
As for the other aspect:
Why is this in my sports news next to last night’s hockey scores instead of next to an article about who was the bitchiest on the lastest episode of Real Housewives?
Because wrestling is "event television" in a way that only sports really is anymore. Andor is one of the greatest shows of all time but, unless you are doing a Reaction podcast, it doesn't matter if you watch that episode from Season 2 tonight or tomorrow or a week from now. Wrestling and sports? People DO still want to watch that "live" because they are afraid someone will spoil the score of the Bulls game (in large part because we grew up with sitcoms where that was the joke). So, in that regard, it makes more sense to cover it with sports rather than to cut into a movie review with how taylor swift's boyfriend caught a ball real good.
Which... gets to the last point that is not WWE specific. A lot of people don't have the time or money to watch it live. This mostly goes back to when PPVs were 50-90 bucks and when all weekly shows were on TV that a lot of "cord cutters" didn't have. But it also just speaks to the general lack of an attention span. A LOT of the Internet Wrestling Community (IWC)... don't actually watch wrestling. They follow live threads or watch clips and then they wait for Dave "It's cool, he just didn't like her tits" Meltzer to give them a star rating.
It has become a lot more prevalent in the AEW era where we have "something else" on weekly TV (no. TNA didn't count. I loved TNA but that shit was the #4 promotion even when there were only two on TV in the US) and the "AEW style" is still heavily informed by The Indies and New Japan where people try to tell a self contained story in every match rather than relying on six months of promos on TV. You will RAPIDLY notice that the IWC will barely mention character work that is not part of a clip released by the company or one that was so good that wrestling twitter clipped it themselves. A live thread might lose their shit over how much rotation a tall lady got on a powerbomb spot and then immediately "forget it" because wrestling twitter didn't care and the company didn't bother to release a clip of it.

Yeah, that's kinda silly. I can see an argument that WWE wrestlers are athletes, no problems there. But they don't actually perform in any sort of athletic competition, which makes thinking of it as a "sport" a little weird. If WWE is a sport, then so is ballet.
- Roberto Bolle wins unprecedented 17th championship against King Mouse in the Nutcracker cage match!

No, we know the outcome's predetermined. Last year's Wrestlemania was basically written six-months ahead of time.
It's still fun to watch though, and the athletes do some amazing shit.
- I wouldn't call them athletes if their skill isn't what determines the outcome. Performers certainly like cirque du Soleil.
  
  I wanted to be a pro wrestler in my teens, I hung around with local wrestlers and did ring crew work from time to time when a show was local. Eventually they started giving me some training and let me tell you it takes a lot of athletic ability to make those moves look good without injuring the other person.
  Just because the outcome is predetermined doesn't mean the lead up to the outcome isn't an athletic competition. They are competing in that ring, it's just that they are competing for a chance at a belt and earning the belt is the equivalent of a promotion in the workplace. Champions get better pay and more opportunities.
  
  Why not? What definition of 'athlete' are you even using? Did you just decide this?
  
  Freestyle skiing, snowboarding, skating, bmx, motocross, mountain bike etc says you're wrong.
  While it's possible to compete in events for most or all of those things competition is only a tiny part of it.
  
  wwe have to labe them as sports performers, so they arnt subject to any regulatory issues, like with roids and standards. we know alot of the wrestlers was on PEDS, rock and cena was the most obvious.
  
  LOL
  Go try to do moonsault off a steel cage without breaking your neck and then you can judge.

Wrestling isn't Wrestling
https://youtu.be/VYvMOf3hsGA
- I remember liking that video the first time I saw it. If I remember correctly though, the creator of that video had quite a few sexual abuse allegations against him and I wasn't really into it after that came to light.
  
  I had no idea. Thanks for enlightening me. I'll forgo referencing Landis from now on. Learn something new everyday...even if the new knowledge is old and awful.

I mean, you see the same kind of thing with scripted television where there's no kayfabe at all. We recently got the season finale of Daredevil Born Again, and there were all kinds of posts/comments/etc talking about how satisfying/bad ass it was to see Daredevil and Punisher beat down a bunch of cops. We all know it's scripted fiction, but it's still fun to watch.

The audience participating in the performance by pretending that it's real is central to the meaning of kayfabe. That never changed, even if it only recently expanded to some media that's in your news feed.

Wrestling and the media surrounding it will always be written/performed as though it is real. There were just as many adults that knew it was fake when we were kids that didn't. It's santa clause and easter bunny style culture. Once you are disillusioned, if you want to continue being involved, you join in on the act.

I don't watch wrestling, and I haven't heard anything about it beyond this post. We must hang out in different circles.

Have you listened to any sports commentators? They all talk about
<insert current game on tv>
as if it's the most important, world-changing event ever, and every little detail had some significance.
My god, baseball is a game for (as Brits would say) boffins. Fans of the game could put meth-head ravers to sleep. I've worked on more exciting spreadsheets for business planning.
And football has become just as bad, with the incessant pre-game/post-game commentary examining every nuance of a play - "I'm pretty sure if the inner aglet of his left shoe had moved the other way, we'd be talking about a completely different game".
Bread and circuses, appealing to our base nature. The difference between WWE and "actual" sports on tv is only a matter of degree.
This seems relevant.

Obligatory:

I know professional wrestling is as real as the MCU or the latest episode of Severance. I am still entertained by all three.
Wrestling winds up in the "sports" section because news outlets have to classify it somehow. That's not the fault of wrestling fans.
There's really no need in life to yuck other people's yum. If it's not for you, that's cool.
- Sports is kind of a stretch. Professional wrestling should be classified as entertainment with the soap operas and marvel slop.
  
  Totally agree but for the opposite reason.
  Wrasslin' is very story driven. Not everyone has time to watch, and the sports news outlets is all spoilers.
  It's like a Harry Potter fan opening their news feed to "Snape kills Dumbledore after epic battle!" plastered all over the news on the day after the book came out. (my apologies to any Harry Potter fans who haven't read all the books or seen all the movies by now, in 2025).
  
  Put it next to ballet and grab some popcorn.

I'm still not quite sure if the winner is predetermined or not. I know the "fighting" isn't real, though the stunts still take skill to pull off safely and in a believable manner, and the rivalries are scripted... Not sure if the entire fight is written in advance or if it's ad-libbed and the winner is just whoever happens to be winning when the fight needs to end for the next event.
And mostly just because I've seen backyard wrestling groups that can go either way with it (without even counting the ones that think it's entirely real and just hurt each other the whole time). Some are entirely scripted, others just ad-lib the fight and the winner is still unknown until it's called.

I haven’t tuned into wresting since the NWO/Wolf Pack days, but I just assumed it was the next generation of naive kids keeping the business alive. In my mind the audience comprises of young boys (mostly) who can still believe it’s ‘real’, their parents who throw money at it because it makes their kid happy, and then of course the fringe set of “wrestling is totally real” guys who should know better but choose not to.

I guess they pretend that wrestling is real to have more fun? idk.
- Since when is that allowed!? /s
  I'm fine with that. My bigger question was simply why am I seeing it in sports news instead of entertainment news all of a sudden? It's not a sport. it's a variety show sponsored by the makers of steroids.
  
  Since when is it forbidden? Who is gatekeeping the sports page?
  And I think you see it in sports news because it reaches their demographic better—some WWE fans are too insecure in their masculinity to visit the arts and culture section, and I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that football and wrestling have a huge crossover demographic.
  We have been living in a post truth world lately, and pretending that WWE is a sport is just another facet of it. Strap in, the nonsense is just getting started.

I wouldn’t call myself a wrestling fan but I see the entertainment/art in professional wrestling. Like anything else entertainment wise it’s an escape for the viewers. Sure the outcome of matches are pre determined but it’s the entire spectacle that you get lost in and forget about the forged display. I never watched WWE growing up but I always heard about John Cena being a charismatic well liked person in and out of the ring. I’m sure the headlines fit more into sports feeds rather than the arts/theater section.

The only professional wrestling I pay attention to is the current US administration.
- {sneaks up behind Trump with a folding chair}

In a way, it is impressive. They make those decisions based on certain factors and his ability to draw crowds, attention, money has been sustained for a long time.
I don’t think people are deluding themselves.