5 Superstars that should’ve challenged AJ Styles for the WWE Title at the 2018 Royal Rumble  

#5 Shinsuke Nakamura

Nakamura needed this match to help him regain his lost momentum

In 2016, WWE had acquired some of NJPW’s biggest wrestlers such as AJ Styles, Luke Gallows, Karl Anderson, and Shinsuke Nakamura. When the company had signed these stand out performers, the wrestling world had expected WWE to make these talented athletes into mainstream superstars, and to especially make Shinsuke Nakamura a bona fide megastar.

The NXT creative team had done just that as Nakamura had one of the most memorable runs in NXT history by contending a 5-star classic against Sami Zayn, capturing the NXT Championship and becoming the overall face of the yellow brand.

Therefore, many had expected Nakamura’s main roster stint to be an immaculate run of him contending for titles, showing off the uncanny charisma he had developed in Japan and to be the biggest wrestler on Smackdown Live.

But soon as Nakamura had landed on the main roster, the creative team have misinterpreted what made him popular, to begin with, put him in competitive matches with wrestlers past their prime and made him a pawn in the Jinder Mahal experiment. All those baffling decisions have immensely slowed down Nakamura’s momentum.

While WWE might be building towards a rumoured clash between AJ Styles and Shinsuke Nakamura at Wrestlemania 34, Styles is hotter than ever, while Nakamura's poor booking has cooled him down significantly.

Therefore, the only way WWE could’ve given Nakamura a lot of momentum on his road to Wrestlemania 34, which might culminate in a match with AJ Styles, was to have him face Styles early at the 2018 Royal Rumble.

While most might debunk that idea because Wrestlemania 34 is a bigger stage to showcase this much-anticipated dream rematch, Nakamura’s magic has dramatically faded over the better part of 2017.

Shinsuke Nakamura vs AJ Styles at the 2018 Royal Rumble would’ve resulted in a 5-star classic that would’ve given Nakamura most of his lost momentum back, provided a clear direction for his character to go in and give the WWE Universe a reason for their concluding match at “The Show of Shows”.