12 WWE Face & Heel Turns That IMMEDIATELY Backfired

12. Mustafa Ali Is Behind Retribution (2020)

Good lord, the Retribution experiment truly was rubbish.

A mysterious band of no good vandals began destroying WWE property during the earliest knockings of the pandemic in 2020, then they revealed that they were all ex-NXT hopefuls who were sick and tired of waiting for their big break. Their goal? To get WWE contracts, even though they...had WWE contracts. Yeah, nothing about this made any sense. It was about as well-thought out as most things during Vince McMahon's creative death rattle.

Then, poor Mustafa Ali was drafted in to try and save the whole thing. He isn't Tom Cruise, and this was a real mission impossible rather than a fictional one. Sure, WWE is fiction, but the reality was that Retribution was already stinking to high heavens by the time Ali unveiled himself as the mastermind behind it all. That, dear readers, just made the high-flying babyface turned scheming heel look like an absolute fool.

WWE abandoned Mustafa's hacker gimmick (which actually looked like it had some potential) in favour of turning him into a mouthpiece and leader for Retribution. Several problems became clear straight away: Firstly, Ali didn't need to turn heel and hadn't even scratched the surface of his babyface run on the main roster. Second, it took him far too long to target Kofi Kingston for "stealing" his WWE Title shot in 2019.

By the time that happened, most fans were bored of the Retribution thing. Hell, WWE's creative team was sick and tired of it come the feud with New Day. No wonder Ali requested his own release from contract after living through this televised purgatory.