John Cena battles Roman Reigns this Sunday night at the Monday Night RAW-exclusive No Mercy pay-per-view, with Brock Lesnar headlining the show when he puts his Universal Championship on the line against Braun Strowman.

While a clash between Cena and The Big Dog was always going to be on the cards at some point, the common assumption was that WWE would save it for a big four pay-per-view, as a match of this magnitude probably does deserve a platform like WrestleMania, Survivor Series, the Royal Rumble or even SummerSlam.

NO MERCY

Instead, it seems like WWE has rushed this by slapping a free agent label on Cena which allowed him to switch to RAW recently.

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While it's clear that his outside commitments are why this match is happening at No Mercy, the 16-time world champion has now also admitted that's the case.

Speaking to Edge and Christian on their Pod of Awesomeness, Cena revealed he can't put all of the outside opportunities on hold while waiting for a match with Reigns down the line.

According to Wrestling Inc, he said: "I can only speculate on why it is and this, not to take anything away from WrestleMania because what an impressive franchise WrestleMania has become.

“I mean, you can look at the stats with Forbes calling it one of the five most profitable franchises, the amount of traction it does for the [WWE] Network and the company, but I think in trying to define what a great consumer experience the Network is, we are not at the challenge of consistently trying to give the consumer unbelievable matches all the time.

OUTSIDE PROJECTS

“And I know personally the outside commitments from me doesn’t help anything. I mean, first of all, I’m 40 [years old], which not only 40, but also doing this televised and on a consistent level for 15 years.

"And I’ve made a promise to myself, once I lose a step, I can’t justify performing for the audience because I don’t want to be that person. So I’m not saying I’m there yet, but I am saying I’ve had some talks with myself about that.

"There’s a lot of stuff going on outside WWE personally for me, which I don’t know what else I could possibly do, so do you hold out for an event in April and sacrifice these other things that could not only be good for personal development, but overall WWE development, I’d say you take the opportunities and figure all the rest of the stuff out.”

With that logic, you probably can't blame Cena for wanting big matches with his future up in the air.

What do you make of Cena's reasoning? Have YOUR say in the comments section below and the fourth episode of GiveMeSport’s WWE podcast is here! Check it out via this link: https://soundcloud.com/user-818579649/gms-wwe-podcast-money-in-the-bank-fallout

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