WWE Crown Jewel 2026: Biggest Winners & Losers

By the grace of God here in the desert, and far away in the desert, the WWE Crown Jewel has come and gone without a hitch. Despite security concerns, venue changes, and 15-minute delays, the new Crown Jewel Champions were crowned, the MITB briefcases were cashed in, and you can read about it all in this section. WWE Crown Jewel 2026 Live Blog. The staff also put in place what they loved and what they hated Crown Jewel 2026 Hated and Loved.

Now it’s time to get into the winners and losers. Usually these things are pretty cut and dry in wrestling, winners are winners and losers are losers, but this column usually assumes “What if they weren’t?”

Obviously, sometimes it’s cut and dry, like Roman Reigns once again coming out on top of the men’s division, and sometimes it’s a little more complicated, like how Chelsea Green has to keep her head up despite losing the WWE Women’s Title to Money In The Bank owner Tiffany Stratton.

Enough introductions, let’s get into the nitty-gritty.

I don’t care that moments after the above photo was taken, Chelsea Green lost her women’s title to Cash in the Bank. Green originally held the title as a joke about the interim champions until an injury led to her becoming the official WWE Women’s Champion.

Ever since winning the title, an air of unworthiness has been fueled towards Green. He was just an “interim” champion who got lucky. But on Saturday, she defeated Liv Morgan, who is for all intents and purposes the Roman Reigns of the WWE Women’s Division, and ended any argument that she doesn’t deserve to be the other half of the WWE Championship coin.

Green may already be a former champion, but he’s ending his reign as legitimately, or at least as legitimately, as a predestined fight series can be. Green is more than Secret Service jokes. She’s more than Matt Cardona’s wife in distress podcast. He is, to use a terrible cliché of corporate jargon, a superstar.

Man, people don’t do it like Cody Rhodes right now. Rhodes defeated his longtime mentor Randy Orton in his quest to win the Last Man Standing Match and the crowd wasn’t having it.

The mobs in Saudi Arabia aren’t as sycophantic as they’ve been made out to be, but they’re still an audience that usually tows the company line pretty steadily. As an audience, they can swallow a lot, but even they couldn’t swallow what Cody fed them on Saturday. Boozers and “overrated” exclamations. After his victory, beans were passed in Rhodes. It’s become commonplace for big guys like Cody Rhodes to wrestle American fans, but international audiences were still pretty crazy about his flashbacks. It seems to be paying off for him, and while that’s bad news for Cody, it’s good news for humanity.

Call me sentimental, but there is something good about the fact that wrestling fans are the same across cultures. It doesn’t matter where you’re from, we’re all a little bored with the whole Cody deal, and that’s cool.

Roman Reigns has a lot more Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in him than we give him credit for. He inherited, or at least learned, Johnson’s ability to read a room, a moment, a pulse, whatever you want to call it. Johnson knows when to give up the high ground in terms of popularity. Reigns knew that if there was ever a crowd that wanted to see Sami Zayn respected, it was in Riyadh.

In fact, I’d be so bold as to say that Reigns just didn’t need the win on Saturday. I think Zayn beating Reigns in Riyad, even if it was for an instant prize like the Crown Jewel Title, would have been an incredible moment, and Reigns taking that out was a bit of a deflation.

Fortunately, the crowd in Riyadh didn’t seem to share my sentiments. In contrast to Cody’s response, Reigns’ inevitable victory was met with cheers, nods from the crowd and a general floating energy in the arena. It was tentative though, and I think knowing Zayn, Reigns made sure it was a moment that ended up leaving a good taste in everyone’s mouth. The match was great, but these two never doubted that they stink. They have to stick the landing and I think they did.

It’s clear that Reigns isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, but if his dominance of the WWE product continues, it will likely take humble, human moments like the one he had after his match with Zayn to maintain it.

I don’t think Liv Morgan did a “bad” job on Saturday. I think he played his part perfectly, but that doesn’t change the fact that he was an amazing prospect despite his ubiquity on WWE Raw.

Morgan is all over the place, he’s on his fourth world title shot, and he somehow still maintains a relationship with Dominic Mysterio. She has been dominant week in and week out but was rolled by Chelsea Green on Saturday and saved from Tiffany Stratton by her stablemates. It just felt like Morgan was a side character when the bell rang. Like I said earlier, I was happy for Green, but I wonder if the Crown Jewel concept has painted WWE into a corner where now I’m forced to watch two world champions match and think “Well, this is just a chapter in a bigger story.” I know that’s the central fantasy of television wrestling, but masking that fact is the whole trick, and I felt like I saw a lot of stitches and wires on Morgan’s side on Saturday.