Every Heel WWE Royal Rumble Winner Ranked From Worst To Best
It's the goal all the bad guys want, but only certain heels have won the the January classic...
There's a babyface one of these coming soon which is predictably more than a little bigger than the list of villains about to be covered.
The Royal Rumble is many things, and often so crucial to the mix is the feeling of a hero conquering almost insurmountable odds. Very few winners have ever had to overcome all the 30 men mentioned in the build-up, but the mere idea that they'd enter and be willing to puts over the contest as well as the perennial format.
There's a delicate balance in booking a heel to go over in match so brilliantly engineered to generate pop after pop after pop, especially WrestleMania implications for the winner. Original Rumbles gifted victories the likes of Hulk Hogan and Big John Studd, but a grand prize being decided during the match as of 1993's edition completely changed the complexion of things.
Back then, WWE still mostly operated as a babyface territory, but with them finding money in the chase during their hottest years, the bad guys have tended to take control of belts around December to justify heroic wins in January.
These were the men and women who convinced the company to go in another direction...
10. Alberto Del Rio (2011)
A run that massively failed to deliver on expectation and occasional bursts of promise, Alberto Del Rio's win should have actually felt more historic than it was.
He was the only wrestler (as of writing) to win a 40-man version of the event, but in an indictment of his Rumble-to-WrestleMania run, he was demoted to losing in the 'Show Of Show's opener against Edge, and had to win July's Money In The Bank to get reheated for a summer series with CM Punk and John Cena.
Concerted effort generating so little reward was all-too-often the trend in WWE, but it all got a little too obvious a little too quick with the relative newcomer.
One man needing so much sh*t thrown at the wall to get him over should have highlighted a wider problem with Del Rio's ability to connect in general, but the Rumble was the first point where it started getting obvious - an otherwise excellent main event felt depressingly hampered by this fairly dispiriting outcome.