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Sami Zayn opens up about his World Championship aspirations in WWE

Originally posted on ClutchPoints | By Matty Breisch | Last updated 5/14/24

While Sami Zayn has accomplished a lot during his WWE career both as a single star and as a tag team specialist, there’s one accomplishment that has illuded the 39-year-old grappler through his decade-plus in the promotion: becoming a WWE world champion.

Discussing his career in WWE both under Vince McMahon and Paul “Triple H” Levesque, Zayn revealed why he felt that the former had a very different opinion of him as a performer than the latter, and why he now has a better chance of being taken seriously as a main event caliber star.

“Here’s how I see it. I think Hunter sees me differently from how Vince saw me, especially as a good guy. I think Vince saw me much more as a bad guy, for a number of reasons. He saw my irksome qualities that he thought lent itself to being an irksome character. Having said that, I think things were a lot more unpredictable because of the nature of Vince’s week to week, kind of approach, that sometimes the marble would just fall in the right hole, and now you’re champion, whereas with Hunter, I think it’s much more he has longer-term vision, and if you’re not part of that vision, then the chances of breaking into that vision are much, much slimmer,” Sami Zayn told The Daily Mail.

“It’s kind of a double-edged sword. He might see me in a way that lends itself more to being in that mix and possibly winning it. But on the other hand, I could have just slipped on a banana peel and won the world title. I just do my best. I just give the best performances I can give, I try to perform with as much emotion as possible and tell the best stories I can tell, and I hope that that eventually gets me there. I’d like to win the world title once before I call it a day, there’s no question, but I don’t live and die by that. It’d be great, and I really appreciate people saying they’d love to see it. I’d love to see it too, and I hope it happens, but if it doesn’t, thank you just the same, because it’s been amazing.”

Is there a world where Zayn becomes a World Champion in WWE? Sure, Triple H felt confident enough about Zayn as a performer to have him unseat the longest-reigning Intercontinental Champion of all time, and his current program with Chad Gable feels built to last, signaling that this reign with the belt could end up being the “Underdog from the Underground’s” longest ever in the WWE Universe. But will it happen? Fans will have to tune in each week to find out.

Kofi Kingston shares Sami Zayn’s appreciation for Triple H.

Speaking of long-time WWE stalwarts who have found success working under both Vince McMahon and Triple H, Kofi Kingston spent some time on the Battleground podcast putting over his new boss, recalling how his decision to shoot Sami Zayn’s entrance in Montreal using a single, extended tracking shot helped to heighten the drama of the moment considerably.

“I think he’s doing such a phenomenal job right now. You got glimpses of what he could do with a roster when he was running NXT. When he took over NXT, there was a lot of eyes on NXT because they just started doing things a little bit differently, especially in comparison to the way things were run on the [main] roster at that given time. So now to see him at the helm, being able to bring that same mentality to the main roster, it’s great. Like I said, you’ve seen the results of it. You’ve seen how people are engrossed in the product. I think he really understands, and you go back and you think about him as a worker, his matches were storyline-based, story-driven. The matches themselves told a story from start to finish. So to bring that same mentality to the show now, you can see that, and I think it’s great. I think he’s doing a phenomenal job. Hat’s off to Triple H. It’s been an amazing ride. I think one of the main things that he focuses on is doing things in a unique way,” Kofi Kingston explained on the Battleground podcast via Fightful.

“It might be a little thing here and there. It might be the way that Sami Zayn enters into Montreal on the heels of Jey Uso leaving the crowd, leaving the building, you see Sami Zayn looking up at the building. Now Sami Zayn comes in. It’s little, but it’s so outside the box that it makes it really, really unique, to get the perspective of the crowd from Sami Zayn’s angle. I’m watching, I’m like, oh my god, it just feels different. There’s a lot of little things like that that he will do. They add so much to the product and the presentation of a match, the presentation of a promo, the presentation of an interaction, somebody being in the background of something, little Easter eggs for people to be rewarded who have invested in the product for so long. So it’s really cool to see that he’s really going out of his way to make the product different after so many years of the way it’s traditionally been.”

After constantly having his father-in-law breathing over his shoulder even after taking on a more prominent role in WWE’s booking strategy in 2022, with Mr. McMahon famously re-booking the RAW after WrestleMania 39 to disastrous results, Triple H is now fully in control of WWE’s on-screen product and can change things up as he pleases, from booking storylines with a more long-term lens to removing the rapid cuts of the promotion’s old team in favor of a more AEW sports-focused presentation. When current WWE stars appreciate the efforts, you know that the 14-time World Champion must be doing something right.