The Curious Case Of Heel Royal Rumble Winners

With this year’s Royal Rumble, we celebrated the 35th official WWE Royal Rumble pay per view event. It has been one of the most famous and anticipated events among the WWE fans from the very first day of its arrival. And that is all because of one simple thing, the Rumble match itself.

The legendary concept that was pitched by WWE Hall of Famer and professional wrestling legend Pat Patterson became so famous that it slowly turned out to be even more famous than WrestleMania to some extent. It has been extremely entertaining and arguably the best form of professional wrestling match.

The Curious Case Of Heel Royal Rumble Winners

Every year 30 individuals participate in Royal Rumble match, only one wrestler gets to win the whole thing. From 2018 WWE also started a women’s Rumble match parallel to the men’s Rumble match which has also become quite successful just like the men’s Rumble match.

One of the biggest attractions of this Rumble match is the surprise entrances. The women’s Rumble match always come out with more surprise entrances since WWE could never fill all regular stars. This is one of the biggest reasons why women’s rumble match is more favourite of many fans.

But what about the winners of the Rumble matches? Did WWE keep the balance of faces and heels throughout these 35 years when coming out with the winners? Let us go through the history of Royal Rumble and see how many he Rumble winners are there till date.

We had to wait for five long years to get our first heel Rumble winner, Ric Flair in 1992. It took five more years to crown the next heel Rumble winner, Stone Cold Steve Austin. The next heel winner came early, only after 2 years. So in the first 12 editions of Rumble, we got only three heel winners. It still looks balanced.

And then it became quite messy. It took 10 long years to Crown the next heel Rumble winner for WWE and that was Randy Orton. It is quite strange that in 10 years, WWE could Crown only one heel winner and the rest were faces.

The next heel winner came quite early, in two years Alberto Del Rio won the first ever 40 man Rumble match. And guess how many heel Rumble winners we got in the next 12 years. Only one, Triple H in 2016. So in 35 years of Royal Rumble, we could only get six heel winners in total. It is difficult to understand why the WWE prefers babyface winners for the Rumble matches.