WWE Crown Jewel 2026: Biggest Winners & Losers

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

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

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

Enough introductions, lets 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 a Money In The Bank cash-in. Green initially won the title as a joke about interim champions, until injury led to her being the official WWE Women’s Champion. 

Since winning the title, there has been an air of unworthiness being fanned in Green’s direction. She was just an “interim” champion who got lucky. But on Saturday, she beat Liv Morgan, who by all intents and purposes is the Roman Reigns of the WWE Women’s Division, and put to rest any argument that she was unworthy of being the other half of WWE’s championship coin.

Green might already be a former champion, but she ends her reign as legitimate, or at least as legitimate as a predetermined fight soap opera can be. Green is more than just secret service jokes. She is more than Matt Cardona’s aggrieved podcast wife. She is, to use a terribly cliched bit of corporate jargon, a superstar.

Man, people do not like Cody Rhodes right now. Rhodes triumphed in his quest to defeat his longtime mentor Randy Orton in a Last Man Standing Match, and the crowd was not having it.

Crowds in Saudi Arabia aren’t quite a sycophantic as has become their reputation, but they are still an audience that usually tows the company line pretty steadily. As an audience, they can swallow a lot, but even they could not swallow what Cody was feeding them on Saturday. Boos, and shouts of “Overrated!” were lobbed at Rhodes following his win. It’s become normal for guys as big as Cody Rhodes to start to bristle against American fans, but international audiences were still pretty gung-ho for his schtick. It seems to be fading for him, and while that’s bad news for Cody, it’s good news for humanity.

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

Roman Reigns has a lot more of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in him than we give him credit. He has 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 cede the high ground, popularity-wise. Reigns knew, if ever there was a crowd that wanted to see Sami Zayn respected, it’s in Riyadh.

In fact, I’d be so bold as to say Reigns simply did not need the win on Saturday. I think Zayn beating Reigns in Riyadh, even if it’s for a momentary prize like the Crown Jewel Title, would’ve been an incredible moment, and Reigns snuffing that out was a little deflating.

Luckily, the crowd in Riyadh did not seem to share my sentiment. In stark contrast to Cody’s response, Reigns’s inevitable win was met with a cheer, fingers acknowledging him from the crowd, and an overall buoyant energy in the arena. It was tentative however, and I think that by acknowledging Zayn, Reigns made sure that the moment was one that ultimately left a good taste in everybody’s mouth. The match was great, but these two were never in doubt of having a stinker. They needed to stick the landing, and I think they did.

It’s clear that Reigns is not going anywhere soon, but if his dominance of the WWE product is to continue, it is probably going to take humble, human moments like the one after his match with Zayn to keep it going.

I don’t think Liv Morgan did a “bad” job on Saturday. I think she played her part admirably, but it doesn’t change the fact that she was a surprising afterthought, despite her omnipresence on “WWE Raw.”

Morgan is everywhere, she’s in her fourth World Title reign, and she’s somehow still keeping up the Dominik Mysterio relationship. On a week-to-week basis, she is dominant, but on Saturday she got rolled up by Chelsea Green and was saved from Tiffany Stratton by her stablemates. It just felt like Morgan was a side character once the bell rang. Like I said earlier, I was happy for Green, but I do wonder if the Crown Jewel concept has painted WWE into a corner, where now I am forced to watch a match between two world champions and think ‘Well, this is just a chapter in a larger story.’ I know that is the central conceit of televised wrestling, but disguising that fact is the whole trick, and I felt like I saw a lot of seams and wires on the Morgan side of things Saturday.