10 Most Hated WWE Champions
4. Jinder Mahal
WWE inadvertently restored some prestige to their top title in 2017 by awarding it to somebody so undeserving that fans almost unanimously separated the title from the man until it was back around the waist of a worthy contender.
Jinder Mahal's fluke push never once evolved beyond the shock of his first victory. If anything, his stock plummeted below the baseline it sat at before he muscled his way into the main event. Forced into playing a bargain basement billionaire, a jingoistic jerk and finally a bigoted berk as the company ran through their cheapest heat-seeking techniques in record time, Mahal was only entertaining an audience of one as paying customers chanted "that's too far" and turned their backs on his disparate defences against Randy Orton and Shinsuke Nakamura.
SmackDown Live! head honcho Road Dogg once infamously argued how match results didn't really matter during a heated Twitter exchange, but AJ Styles' liberation of the belt on a November edition of the show proved him profoundly incorrect. Jinder's loss was everybody's gain, as was the eventual termination of a such a wretched experiment.