Big Vinny V: Why Penta should beat Roman Reigns for the WWE World Heavyweight Championship

On Monday Night Raw, Penta defeated his brother Rey Fenix to earn a match for the WWE World Heavyweight Championship in Mexico City in two weeks. For most, it’s a foregone conclusion that Penta will push Reigns to the limit before going down in defeat. The smarter move, however, would be to shock the world and put the belt on the hometown luchador. 

The fact of the matter is that WWE’s top tier has grown awfully stale. Almost everyone close to a world championship has been a top guy in the company for several years. Reigns himself won his first world title in WWE in 2015. CM Punk, the reigning Undisputed WWE Champion, won his first in 2008.

A quick glance at the Raw and SmackDown roster reveals other names who have been champions for many years now. Drew McIntyre won his first WWE world championship in 2020. Seth Rollins’ first came in 2015. Randy Orton won his first in 2004—just a few months after Je’Von Evans was born. 

To be fair, there have been a few new first-time champions in recent years. Cody Rhodes, Gunther, and Damian Priest won their first world titles in 2024; Jey Uso won his in 2025; and of course Sami Zayn won his just a couple of months ago. But most of those have been prominent names in WWE for longer than that—Zayn and Uso main evented WrestleMania against each other in 2023, for example. 

The plan in WWE seems to be for Reigns to eventually drop his title to Oba Femi, which is all well and good, but doesn’t seem imminent. Is Reigns’ reign going to last all the way to WrestleMania? Even the Royal Rumble is still five months away. What on earth is on the table for this lame-duck championship run between now and then? More tournaments spanning several weeks to find challengers while the champ sits at home?

If WWE is going to pull the trigger on an upset title win, this seems to be as good a time as ever. Penta is already a star in Mexico, and a championship victory in Arena CDMX would shoot him into legendary status. More importantly, Penta has shown he can get over anywhere in the world, from Mexico to Lucha Underground to AEW to WWE. NFL stars like George Kittle are copying his gimmick, showing how close Penta is to breaking out in the mainstream. 

If WWE has any questions how this title switch might go, they can just follow the template of their competition. Darby Allin won the AEW World Championship in a big upset in his hometown and then went on a tear of exciting, fresh, matches. When he eventually dropped the title back to Maxwell Jacob Friedman at Double or Nothing, both wrestlers and the championship were better off for it. That’s not even mentioning what the title shots meant for Allin’s challengers, such as Tommasso Ciampa, Brody King, or Kevin Knight. 

As their former owner loved to say, anything can happen in the WWE. On September 14 in Mexico City, we’ll see if that’s still true.