Minimum Wage Nerd

2025 is a monumental year for professional wrestling as it will see two of the biggest icons from the 2000s and 2010s finally hang up the boots.

In the U.S., John Cena is on his farewell tour with WWE and set to have his final match on Dec. 13 in Washington D.C. for Saturday Night’s Main Event. The final opponent has not been set as of writing, though, as a tournament is in progress to see who will lock up with Cena on Dec. 13.

No other matches have been announced for the show.

Across the Pacific Ocean, Hiroshi Tanahashi will have his final match at Wrestle Kingdom 20 on Jan. 4, 2026. It is widely viewed as New Japan’s equivalent show to WrestleMania. Tanahashi’s final opponent has already been confirmed to be former-New Japan star and current AEW Unified Champion Kazuchika Okada. The longtime rival of ‘The Ace’ was announced as Tanahashi’s opponent at a Nov. 9 press conference.

Also confirmed for Wrestle Kingdom 20 is the New Japan Strong Women’s Champion Saya Kamitani vs. IWGP Women’s Champion Syuri in a winner-take-all match, IWGP World Heavyweight Champion Konosuke Takeshita vs IWGP Global Heavyweight Champion Yota Tsuji in a winner-take-all match, El Desperado vs. Kosei Fujita vs. Sho vs. Taiji Ishimori for the IWGP Junior Heavyweight Championship, and EVIL defending the NEVER Openweight Championship against the debuting Olympic gold medalist judoka Aaron Wolf.

Less than a month apart from each other, wrestling fans will be waving goodbye to a pair widely regarded as the top guys in professional wrestling on their side of the Pacific. But it is rather as these two have been seemingly tied at the hips for their whole careers without even realizing. The pair have seemingly been a mirror for the other, whether they realized it or not, since the very start.

It all goes back to when they each started in wrestling, fittingly, around the same time in 1999.

Cena moved from Massachusetts to California to begin his training with and debuting at Ultimate Pro Wrestling. At the same time as Cena, a young man from Orange County, California, was training at UPW with Cena who scouts from WWE who told the young man that while they recognized the talent, his look wasn’t what WWE and Vince McMahon was looking for. This young man would go on to become Samoa Joe, who carved a brilliant, violent path across pro wrestling in companies including TNA, WWE, AEW, and Ring of Honor and become heralded as one of the best of his generation alongside names such as Bryan Danielson, Chris Hero, and Nigel McGuinness.

Tanahashi would begin his training in the NJPW Dojo in 1998 and made his in-ring debut in October 1999. Around the same time as Tanahashi’s debut, his dojo classmates Katsuyori Shibata and Shinsuke Nakamura would make their respective debuts for New Japan. The trio would be dubbed the “new Three Musketeers” of New Japan, meaning they were viewed as the new top three stars taking over for the original “Three Musketeers” – Shinya Hashimoto, Keiji Muto, and Masahiro Chono. Nakamura would spend much of his career in New Japan and become one of its top stars, especially after his evolution into the King of Strong Style. Shibata would march to his own drum, working for New Japan and several other companies before a brain injury forced him to step away from wrestling in 2017 before returning in 2021 and signing with AEW in 2022.

Cena and Tanahashi would rise to superstardom in WWE and NJPW, respectively, by the mid-2000s and become the top stars of their respective company. It couldn’t have come at a better time for each company, as well.

The 2000s was a period of serious decline for New Japan due to founder Antonio Inoki’s attempt to integrate MMA into pro wrestling. This resulted in several top names such as Yuji Nagata being booked in fights for MMA organization K-1 and getting beaten badly in fights. Inoki would also place the company’s top title, the IWGP Heavyweight Championship, on names such as Bob Sapp and Brock Lesnar that failed to cause any notable impact on business.

Tanahashi would quickly emerge as a face and name that wrestling fans gravitated to between his ringwork and personality. This elevated him to the main event scene and he would win his first IWGP Heavyweight Title in 2006. He became known as “The Ace of the Universe” and “The Once in a Generation Talent” and helped sail New Japan out of these hard times to its mid-2010s boom period.

In the U.S., WWE was starting to experience a downturn in business in the wake of the end of the Monday Night Wars. WWE would ultimately buy WCW and ECW, making it the only “game in town” when it came to nationally televised professional wrestling. However, the lack of any real competition for WWE, along with some creative missteps such as Steve Austin’s failed heel turn, led to a notable drop in ratings and struggling ticket sales for house shows.

Cena made his WWE TV debut on SmackDown in 2002, answering an open challenge from Kurt Angle. Angle asked what made Cena think he had a chance against an established star, which Cena famously responded “ruthless aggression.” He would struggle to find his footing for his first few months, a period Cena claims he came very close to being fired before then-head of creative Stephanie McMahon heard Cena freestyling on the talent bus. This led to Cena becoming the “Doctor of Thuganomics” and the rest, as they say, is history. Cena would win his first WWE Championship in 2005 and remain a constant in the main event scene during a period that saw WWE slowly shift to TV-PG and land ever-increasing media rights deals that helped turn WWE into an entertainment powerhouse.

Within their respective promotion’s main event scene, Cena and Tanahashi would be constants at the top of the card for roughly a decade. Other big names would surround them, but fans understood these two were the ones the promotions say as the true top names on the talent roster.

Their time at the top would begin to fade in the mid-2010s, though, as age and a new generation of talent began rising up WWE and New Japan. Cena would soon see names like Roman Reigns, Seth Rollins, and Kevin Owens taking over the main event scene while Tanahashi would see a young Kazuchika Okada emerge to dominate the IWGP World Heavyweight title picture.

The only true deviation between the two, though, is the direction each one appears to be taking once they retire.

Like Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson and Dave Bautista, John Cena has made massive inroads into Hollywood during the late-2010s and 2020s. Cena would really find his footing in comedy, landing multiple supporting and leading roles in a variety of comedies and earn praise for his comedic instincts. He landed one of his biggest roles in 2019 when he was cast as Christopher Smith, AKA Peacemaker, in the James Gunn-directed DC Comics-based film The Suicide Squad. Cena would subsequently star in the HBO Max spinoff series Peacemaker and was confirmed to be part of DC’s rebooted cinematic universe, the DCU, in 2025’s Superman.

Tanahashi, however, is far from done within professional wrestling. The multi-time IWGP World Champion was named as New Japan’s new President and Representative Director in December 2023. Like many others executives in the promotion, Tanahashi has been working to help the company rebuild after it was hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic and shutdown in 2020, followed in subsequent years by the departure of many top stars including Jay White, Kazuchika Okada, and Will Ospreay. 2025 hasn’t been a kind year, either, as New Japan is one of many entities in Japan hit hard by the country’s economic downturn. Things have been looking up, though, as several new names like Gabe Kidd, Yota Tsuji, and Kosei Fujita have made waves at a time when New Japan has been in need of new top names.

Other than that, January 2026 will mark the official end to an era of wrestling filled with plenty of ups and downs for fans and the industry. WWE’s rise within the media landscape, the various indie booms, New Japan’s reemergence in the 2010s, and the rise of AEW are just a few of the things to take place during Cena and Tanahashi’s time at the top of the industry.

For some, it may be strange to even think of pro wrestling without Tanahashi or Cena around. The day was always bound to arrive, and arrive it almost has so take in what you can of these two icons before they step out of the ring for good.