WWE's Roman Reigns Made His FCW Debut Nearly 15 Years Ago With A Different Ring Name

"The Tribal Chief." "The Big Dog." "The Head of the Table." All of these names have been used to describe former WWE Champion Roman Reigns since he arrived on the company's main roster as part of The Shield back in 2012. Real name Joe A'noai, Reigns has been with WWE officially for 15 years at the time of writing, debuting in the company's Florida Championship Wrestling developmental promotion in 2010 after years of playing Football. However, he wasn't Roman Reigns quite yet as he actually debuted under a different name.

On August 19, 2010, Roman Leakee debuted for FCW in a battle royal that reads as a whos' who of current and former WWE Superstars, with a number of the participants having a lot of success in their own career. Stars like Epico, Titus O'Neil, Big E (then Big E Langston), and even his cousin and current WWE World Heavyweight Champion Jey Uso were all involved, as were stars who had previous experience on the independent scene and companies like ROH and TNA, such as Xavier Woods, and Kaval, who many people know better as Low Ki.

The match would eventually be won by Alex Riley, who would eventually end up on WWE's main roster just a few months later, while Roman remained in developmental to perfect his skills. However, given WWE's love of chopping people's names in half at the time, Roman Leakee simply became Leakee by the end of the year. Going solely by the name Leakee would stick with the future "Tribal Chief" all the way up until 2012, even after FCW was morphed into what would eventually become "WWE NXT" as his first match at an NXT live event in August 2012 against CJ Parker, now better known as Juice Robinson in AEW, was under the Leakee name.

Immediately after his first match as part of "NXT," Leakee would get his first name back, and just a few weeks later, the Leakee name would be no more as Roman Reigns was born, and not only started making appearances on live events with the WWE main roster, but he would also start appearing on the new "WWE NXT" TV show. As for how he landed on the name Roman Reigns, the future WWE Champion stated on an episode of "Talk is Jericho" in 2017 that he knew he liked the name Roman, but the surname came from a conversation with a future WWE commentator.

"I knew I wanted Roman. I liked Roman. I wanted Roman only and they were like, 'no, you need a last name'. And there's actually another guy in FCW by the name of Calvin Raines. He spelled it like 'rain', like a 'raindrop'. And they, I believe, released him and sorry, brother. He's a good man, a real nice brother. Sorry. Roman Raines sounded good to me, so they were like, 'alright, give me four or five different names' and they were like, 'okay, we'll go with like'? I was going through it and Corey Graves, he was down in FCW, still working at that time, he's actually one of my good buddies and our families are like really good friends. He told me, he was like, 'hey, I heard you saying 'Roman Raines'. What if you spelled it like, 'reigns', like a king reigns.' And I was like, 'whoa, I like that.' And there you go. And total heel name too!"

That decision would ultimately lead to him setting records with both the WWE Universal Championship, and the WWE Championship, and even led to him to headline WrestleMania on ten separate occasions. After all, seeing Leakee on the marquee of WWE's biggest event of the year doesn't jump out at people in the same way that Roman Reigns does today.