WWE is bringing one in every of its marquee occasions to Tampa Bay. The group introduced on Wednesday that the thirty seventh Royal Rumble occasion will happen at Tropicana Area on Saturday, Jan. 27.
The promotion will spend a number of days within the Tampa Bay space, together with the Royal Rumble in St. Petersburg and WWE Uncooked in Tampa on Jan. 29. It marks the primary time since 1995 that Tampa Bay will host the annual occasion. The realm additionally hosted WrestleMania in 2021.
The upcoming occasion will characteristic a 30-man and a 30-woman Royal Rumble match, in line with a press launch from WWE. The winner of every rumble will obtain championship matches at WrestleMania 40, at the moment scheduled for April 6 and April 7 in Philadelphia.
The Royal Rumble is one in every of WWE’s conventional “massive 4” occasions, extra not too long ago dubbed the “massive 5” to include Cash within the Financial institution. The opposite occasions on this bubble embody SummerSlam, Survivor Sequence and WrestleMania. The inaugural Royal Rumble was held in 1988 as a part of a televised occasion and subsequently turned a standalone occasion in 1989. The Rumble historically serves as “The Street to WrestleMania,” a three-month season the place that yr’s WrestleMania card begins to take form.
Final yr’s Royal Rumble winners have been Cody Rhodes and Rhea Ripley. Rhodes unsuccessfully challenged Reigns in the primary occasion of WrestleMania 39 Evening 2. Ripley defeated Charlotte Aptitude to turn into SmackDown girls’s champion. Ripley was subsequently topped the inaugural Girls’s world champion, a title she actively holds.