Zayn's work received critical acclaim.

One of the highlights of WWE programming over the past few years has been Sami Zayn’s work in The Bloodline faction.

Zayn, would reflect on the story during an interview with Ryan Satin (Out of Character podcast), and this is what the reigning Undisputed Tag Team Champion had to say:

“It was a little hard, you know, if you want the truth. It was a little hard because it’s, and I don’t think I’m being controversial when saying this, but I’m not the chosen guy, obviously. I’ve been handed a lot of opportunities and I’ve delivered on a lot of those opportunities throughout my time in the company and I’m grateful for all of it, but clearly, I mean, I don’t think anyone would say like, ‘Oh, clearly he was being positioned to be the top guy or to be the most popular guy on the show.’ Obviously, that’s not the case, and that’s fine.”

“I guess in the back of your head, you’re always banking on your ability to get there, and somehow or another, you just feel like you’ll get there, and then it is hard to get there. It’s almost miraculous to get there, or to get one of these organic runs that the audience sort of wills into existence. You could probably count them on one hand in the last 10 years with Daniel Bryan, Becky Lynch, Kofi Kingston, and myself, and who knows what’s happening with LA Knight, I feel like he’s starting to get a little bit of that right now at the moment, and good for him.”

“But all this to say, it’s like a lightning in the bottle type of thing. You don’t get it very often, and then you kind of get it, and you’re like, the story, the audience, your performance, all of it has like almost it’s just gotten you to the exact right place that you dreamed you’d be, and then when you get there, it’s like, you just kind of fall short and you don’t know if you’ll ever get it back. So for sure that’s hard and you don’t know if you can do it again. Like I said, it’s only happened a handful of times in the last 10 years.”

“If and when I do get to that mountain top again, or I get in the title picture and I’m the big challenger, or trying to fulfill my destiny, or whatever it is, it might still get there, but it’ll just have a different feel. It’ll still be part of the overarching story of the character. But it just felt like one of those things like man, I forced their hand as much as humanly possible, but still just a buck short, you know, and it was it was a hard pill to swallow, for sure it was, even though you kind of know what the plan is or where things are headed or this and that.”

“There’s kind of this hope that you hold on to like, ‘Yeah, but if the crowd is loud enough, and the story is good enough, like, it’s kind of right there’, and it kind of felt like we got right there, about as close as any human being on Earth can get without actually getting there. Like, that’s as close as anyone on Earth has ever come without getting there. But it’s fine because getting there on its own is an amazing feat. I mean, what I mean by getting there is not beating Roman, but getting to that match everyone wants you to beat Roman and getting an audience in that frenzy, and experiencing an audience like that, again, being a part of a story like that, very few people on Earth can say that ever done that.”

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