Sami Zayn has been the most consistent good-guy underdog of WWE's last decade. That role may be running out of road.
Vocal sections of the live crowd have been turning on the Canadian veteran, and the dirt sheets are now openly speculating that Backlash 2026 in Tampa is the right venue for a heel turn — with all of it taking place in the framework of his United States Championship challenge against Trick Williams.
"Other fans have officially turned on Sami Zayn," wrestling outlet WrestleMia reported in its Backlash preview. "And there have been vocal calls from the fans for Zayn to turn heel, potentially at Backlash this weekend."
The storytelling logic is rare in modern WWE: the kind of double turn the company has historically struggled to execute. "At Backlash, Trick Williams, the reigning US champion, is super popular with the crowd right now," the source explained. "So a double turn could work very well if executed carefully."
The risk, however, is real. WWE creative is known to over-engineer character turns, and Williams' babyface persona — built on confidence, charisma and an organic catchphrase culture — is the kind of thing that can be undermined by a forced switch.
"But the issue with doing a double turn is that WWE may strip away elements of Williams' persona that got him over in the first place," the report cautioned. "So it's a risky move to say the very least."
Zayn's case for a turn is largely structural. He has spent more than a decade as the underdog babyface — the audience has heard every comeback, seen every tearful promo, sat through every loss-to-heat-recovery cycle. The character has begun to feel like a setting on a slider rather than a fully realised person, and a heel pivot — particularly one where Zayn lashes out at fans who he feels have stopped backing him — would generate the kind of authentic anti-pop that creative cannot manufacture without performer buy-in.
Williams, conversely, has reached the point in his arc where staying babyface risks repetition. The US Championship has been positioned as a workrate strap on Smackdown, and a heel run with the title — the right kind of heel run — could push him toward the WrestleMania 43 main event picture in 2027.
Whether WWE pulls the trigger at Backlash or chooses to let the story breathe through to Money in the Bank in June is the question facing creative. The Tampa crowd is one of the more responsive WWE travels to, and the kind of heel turn Zayn could deliver — pointed, articulate, weaponising his own underdog history — is rarely better received than in a building primed to react.
The match's title implications are secondary. Whoever wins the strap on Saturday matters less than whether the company comes out of Tampa with two redefined characters.
