SummerSlam (2016)
WWE's 2016 SummerSlam pay-per-view
The 2016 SummerSlam was a professional wrestling pay-per-view (PPV) and livestreaming event produced by WWE, held for wrestlers from the promotion's main roster brands, Raw and SmackDown. It was the 29th annual SummerSlam and took place on August 21, 2016, at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York. This was the second of four consecutive SummerSlam events to take place at the arena. It was also WWE's first PPV and livestreaming event held after the brand extension, which was reintroduced in July, went into full effect.
Twelve matches were contested at the event, including three on the Kickoff pre-show. In the main event, which was an interbrand match, Raw's Brock Lesnar defeated SmackDown's Randy Orton by technical knockout. In another marquee match, "The Demon King" Finn Bálor defeated Seth Rollins to become the inaugural WWE Universal Champion, which was introduced to be Raw's world championship. In other prominent matches, Dean Ambrose defeated Dolph Ziggler to retain SmackDown's WWE World Championship, and AJ Styles defeated John Cena in a singles match from SmackDown.
Production
Background
SummerSlam is an annual professional wrestling event produced every August by WWE since 1988. It was originally broadcast exclusively via pay-per-view (PPV) before it began simultaneously livestreaming on the WWE Network in 2014.
The public source identifies “SummerSlam (2016)” as wWE's 2016 SummerSlam pay-per-view. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around SummerSlam, WWE's and pay-per-view.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q21029142. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2016, 1988 and 2014.
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This entry incorporates text from “SummerSlam (2016)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.