5 heels who won their first WWE world title clean
Heels and clean victory are two terms that do not often appear together in WWE dictionary. Most often, WWE makes the heel wrestler do some underhand tactic to secure a win over his or her opponent.
Kevin Owens' maiden Universal title, and Jinder Mahal's maiden WWE title victories are some of the most recent examples here. While Triple H shockingly turned on Seth Rollins to award Owens his first world title, The Singh brothers distracted Randy Orton to help The Modern Day Maharaja claim his first ever singles gold.
However, there have been a few instances where the heels went over the babyfaces clean. Even after being portrayed as the lazy heel who does not care for the WWE Universe, Brock Lesnar defeated Roman Reigns at WrestleMania 34.
Randy Orton won his title unification match against John Cena clean at TLC 2013, but both Orton and Lesnar were some of the most prominent wrestlers at that time.
Some heel superstars toppled the champion clean to win their first ever world title. In this list, we will be taking a look at 5 of those guys.
Note: No Money in the Bank cash-ins are included in this list. Hence, this list excludes some big names like Edge, CM Punk, The Miz, Daniel Bryan, and Seth Rollins who all were heels at that time. The ECW title is also not counted in this list. Only those title changes that took place from the Ruthless Aggression era are included, otherwise the list would be too enormous.
#5 Sheamus
The rise of Sheamus in WWE was impressive. After making his WWE debut on June 2009, Sheamus quickly went up the ranks. He was one of the survivors in Survivor Series 2009, and quickly earned a WWE Championship match against John Cena at Tables, Ladders and Chairs 2009, after winning a battle royale.
The match was announced to be a tables match. However, to everyone's surprise, the Irish superstar defeated big match John clean, after Cena went through a table while attempting a Superplex. Sheamus became the first ever Irish born WWE Champion.