WWE Night Of Champions 2026: Biggest Winners & Losers

Sami Zayn is WWE Champion and Oba Femi and IYO SKY are King and Queen of the ring after the latest WWE PLE in Saudi Arabia, Night of Champions. If you want to read all about what happened, there's the Night Of Champions 2026 results writeup. The Wrestling Inc. Staff has also broken down reactions to WWE Night Of Champions 2026. All that's left is the winners and the losers.

As always, the losers can sometimes be winners, like Gunther, and the winners can sometimes be losers, like IYO SKY. It's more of a vibe thing, than a literal thing. You can keep the conversation going in the comments section.

Without further ado, the biggest winners and losers of WWE Night of Champions 2026.

This summer has basically been WWE playing a game of seeing how they can get out of putting the WWE title on Gunther. Once again, he walked into a main event situation, and walked out with more grievances that can be turned into a future world title match. No matter who walked out of Night of Champions with the title, it was clear that Gunther is factored into main event plans for many more weeks, maybe even months.

It will only work for so long. WWE will have to pull the trigger eventually, but for now, Gunther has a pretty sweet gig. Cody Rhodes can continue to hot potato the title with Drew McIntyre and Sami Zayn and whomever else, while Gunther shakes his head and says "couldn't be me." 

It's good to have someone like Gunther haunting the edges of the world title scene. It gives the division some boundaries. Maybe he faces Cody, maybe he faces Sami Zayn, maybe he faces King of the Ring Oba Femi; there's a lot of possible matches that could come from this weird little quirk of his booking, and it ensures that Gunther will have plenty to do on the blue brand.

Liv Morgan has kinda sunk the Women's World Title division. The weariness of her elongated story with Dominik Mysterio is bleeding into the division, and now IYO SKY is set to get sucked into the vortex. No matter what happens, I have a bad feeling that it will be about Liv. IYO could win, and the question wouldn't be "What's next for the division?" but "What's next for Liv Morgan after losing the title?"

Sky has plenty of history with WWE Women's Champion Rhea Ripley, but rather than mine that juicy narrative vein, WWE has opted to make her a side character in the Liv & Dom show. I would love to sit here and say, "Hooray, all hail Queen IYO," but I'm struggling to be excited. There's something underwhelming about the Queen of the Ring tournament leading to a rematch of the finals.

There is plenty of time for WWE to prove me wrong, but I never appreciate them putting me in the position to cross my arms and furrow my brow.

WWE storytelling is so hermetically sealed, that it can keep even the most over superstar from breaking out of their preordained roles. Stories are planned, mapped, and scheduled to almost exacting degrees. So when WWE actually runs with something that's working, it can feel like a miracle.

I was one of the many doomers who expected Jey Uso to with the King of the Ring and continue his impossible run as a "Main Event" talent who never wrestles in a real main event. Surely, WWE will cool Oba's momentum, get him ready for Lesnar, or at the very least hold him back to maximize a later moment. Instead, WWE saw how people are reacting to the quasi-mythological WWE star.

Femi's rise has been fairly unprecedented. He is a product, created whole-cloth by the WWE system, that has the kind of grassroots momentum  WWE "projects" rarely get. It is not clear how far WWE is willing to go with Femi, but it's clear that they are listening to the reactions. Maybe he wins the WWE Championship, maybe he retires Brock Lesnar, maybe he does all that and more. The sky is the limit for "The Ruler."

A feud that was already struggling for drama hit a new low on Saturday. Bron Breakker and Seth Rollins had a deeply stupid cage match. It was the kind of egregiously long, community theater production that has become WWE's bread and butter. It could've at least been forgivable, had Breakker won, but WWE's ridiculous obsession with Seth Rollins continues.

I get that Logan Paul is injured, and Bronson Reed is injured, and no one likes Austin Theory, but that doesn't change the fact that WWE has kinda wasted all of their precious time, in service of making Seth Rollins look good for the umpteenth time. I don't believe that the Vision will ever be the future of WWE. I don't think anyone is getting anything from this feud, except for Seth Rollins, and he is at the point where he should be giving back.

Five minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, there is no such thing as the "perfect length" for a match that is in service of one of the most over-pushed wrestlers of the last decade. Breakker is being sacrificed on an altar to a worse tomorrow. I'm not saying he could've been the next Roman Reigns. I'm just saying that he has a much higher ceiling than the one WWE seems to be forcing on him, and other wrestlers of his generation.

5 is an awkward number, I know, but WWE PLEs only have so many matches. So I'm taking the opportunity to end on a moment of hope.

Do I really have to explain this one? I am simply not jaded or cynical enough to not enjoy this moment. Sami Zayn is the WWE Champion. It doesn't matter that he should've won it years ago. It doesn't matter that he's going to have to lose it at some point in the future. It doesn't matter that WWE didn't mic the crowd properly, leading to images of the crowd almost-silently losing their sh** at the big win. All that matters is that now, for this perfect moment, the Right Guy is WWE Champion, holding the belt of Sammartino and Hogan and Cena. The second Muslim WWE Champion, after the Iron Sheik. No runner-up World Heavyweight Title, the real deal successor to the winged-eagle is in the hands of Sami Zayn.

El Generico is in a Mexican orphanage somewhere, beaming with pride that his friend and confidant Sami Zayn is world champion.