John Cena Has Heavily Hinted At Retirement After Defeat To Roman Reigns

John Cena may be spending a lot more time on the silver screen being the world's best bloke than he will spend being Big Match John in the squared circle, from now on.

Everyone's favourite jean shorts enthusiast took a clean pinfall loss to everyone's least favourite WWE Golden Boy, Roman Reigns, last night at No Mercy and then treated the crowd at the Staples Centre in Los Angeles to what has now become the big man's customary prolonged goodbye that he wheels out after a big loss before heading off for a few months to be Amy Schumer's boyfriend or a tattooed drug dealer at Tina Fey and Amy Poehler's house party or something similarly hilarious.

Cena binned off his trademark sweatbands after losing to AJ Styles at SummerSlam last year and last night soaked in a cacophony of 'Thank you, Cena' chants before slowly making his way up the ramp and saluting the crowd for what seemed like about an hour.

Fair play, the 16-time world champion has more than earned the respect of wrestling fans everywhere, having been the biggest star in the industry for the last dozen years and also being an actual 40-year-old man who wears sweatbands, oversized t-shirts and runs to the ring accompanied by a theme tune that he rapped himself. Fucking hell, when you see it written out like that, it just makes you love him even more, doesn't it?

Anyway, the rumours doing the rounds at the moment are that Cena is indeed very close to retirement, which may explain why he's been running through dream matches like they're going out of fashion since his return to the WWE ring in July (if you discount his flag match with Rusev, that is) with Shinsuke Nakamura, Braun Strowman and now Reigns all being booked against the Doctor of Thuganomics (a nickname that doesn't get used anywhere near enough, nowadays) over the past two months.

The bout with Reigns at No Mercy was essentially the WWE's way of trying to further establish the former Shield member as 'The Guy' by beating the top guy of the last decade. Whether this passing of the torch moment actually works in the long run remains to be seen, but Cena certainly seems to be doing his best to make it seem as if retirement is looming, especially with his latest Instagram and Twitter posts.

With Cena having filming for Transformers film Bumblebee on the way, chances are that Big Match John is simply taking another extended hiatus and will be back in time for the Royal Rumble and WrestleMania season at the beginning of next year.

Or he's finished in the squared circle forever in which case this is the worst day, ever and we should all get a week off work to recover from the grief.

Topics: Wrestling, John Cena, WWE

Joe Baiamonte

Northerner. Assistant Editor of SPORTbible. Studied Journalism and Broadcasting in a portakabin on a car park of Salford University for three years. Believes football peaked with Serie A in the '90s and strong-arms pro wrestling references into as many articles as possible. Neymar once took 50 euros off me during a game of poker.

@JoeBaia