10 WWE Heels You Most Want To Punch In The Face

It's a classic storytelling cliché that it's the villain who defines the hero, and nowhere is this more true in wrestling. If there's one thing that all fans can agree upon, it's that a clean, competitive match between two good, honest wrestlers is goddamn boring. We might like our babyface good guys, but the amount of pulse-pounding drama you can get out of liking something is limited. To really add the spice to the soup, you can't just cheer for your hero to win; you also want them to punish the dastardly bad guy.

Aristotle said that in tragedy, we purge the feelings of pity and fear, but in wrestling, the emotion we want to experience is a sense of justice. When we see heels cheat without recrimination from the referee, sneak away from fair fights, and laugh at the hero's indignation, our blood boils.

That's why when we're watching the payoff match of a feud, our desire to see the hero win is sometimes completely secondary to our need to see the villain get their comeuppance. And the absolute best heels are the ones who always seem to get away with their dirty tricks.

Since returning from double shoulder surgery in 2019, Sami Zayn has been gradually refining his act from the audience-lambasting "Critic of the Critics," to managing Shinsuke Nakamura and Cesaro in the Artist Collective, before finally blossoming into his current form as a highly paranoid, conspiracy-theory-spouting nutcase, unwilling to reconcile objective fact with his own distorted versions of events.

Tapping into current societal trends, Zayn portrays the type of person we all fear getting stuck in a conversation with, or worse, meeting at a family reunion: a certified lunatic who is obsessed with being right, and who feels completely justified cheating at every turn because of the belief everyone else is working against him.

Obsessed with his simultaneous superiority and victimhood, Zayn is lampooning current events as he insists he is still Intercontinental Champion despite losing the strap to Big E. Fed up with the injustices he sees perpetrated against him, Zayn has hosted a show to give himself made-up awards, and hired a film crew to document the maltreatment he experiences every day in the WWE. He is showing us an image of the worst aspects of our society, so we can see the truth: our society can be really, really damn annoying.