12 WWE Face & Heel Turns That IMMEDIATELY Backfired

WWE's writers don't script heel or babyface turns to deliberately fail. That'd be counterproductive, not to mention a complete and utter waste of their precious time. Ask anybody who has ever worked any shifts on the company's creative team and they'll tell you that time is scarce - they need 48 hours days for each 24 on offer, so they're not exactly going to muck about coming up with stuff they know will be crap.

That's a bit of a scary thought when considering some of the junk that's been hurled in front of fans this century alone, but it is what it is. Being overworked likely explains away some of the nonsense served up. Remember, every single one of the turn angles examined here was supposed to work - WWE wanted you to cheer prior villains just as much as they wanted you to boo prior heroes.

Where's Mick Jagger to belt out a quick, "You can't always get what you want" refrain when you need him?

Many on the active WWE roster will suffer the same fate these poor sods did. They might've had good intentions, and turns might even have made sense on paper during crunch creative team meetings, but actually working in front of the cameras? That's a different story.

The tricky part is that nobody can predict with 100% accuracy whether a turn will work or not until it's happened. Finding out live in real time is likely hellish, but it's unavoidable.

Check out all of these heel and baby switches that tanked pretty much immediately.

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.