Report: Penta Favored to Win WWE’s Luchador Tournament

Word from behind the scenes suggests Penta is the favorite to come out on top of WWE’s ongoing luchador tournament, a bracket built to crown a challenger for Roman Reigns’ WWE World Heavyweight Championship on the September 14 edition of Monday Night Raw in Mexico City.

Penta has already banked the first win of the tournament, defeating Laredo Kid to advance. That result, paired with the internal expectation that he’s ultimately being groomed to walk out of the bracket as the winner, points to WWE building toward a Reigns–Penta showdown on home turf in Mexico.

It’s not hard to see why Penta would be the pick. Since arriving in WWE, he’s become one of the most over acts on the roster, with his lucha libre pedigree, distinctive presentation, and grassroots following giving him a level of crowd heat that few can match. A title match against Roman Reigns in Mexico City would be as close to a can’t-miss spectacle as WWE could script for that market — the kind of hometown-adjacent moment that plays directly into Penta’s existing connection with Latino audiences and the broader lucha libre fanbase WWE has been courting more aggressively in recent years.

Of course, tournaments like this exist in WWE largely to generate weeks of storytelling and to test other names against one another before the promotion commits to its true intended finalist, so nothing is locked in publicly. Brackets have been known to shift based on how crowds react to matches, how storylines develop in the interim, and whether the company decides a swerve serves the bigger picture better than the expected outcome. Still, when the belief is coming from within the company itself, it tends to carry real weight — especially with a marquee international show already circled on the calendar.

A Reigns title defense in Mexico City is already a significant event on its own; pairing it with a hometown-style hero in Penta would raise the stakes considerably and give WWE a clean emotional hook for what promises to be a loud, passionate crowd. If Penta does indeed advance through the remaining rounds, expect WWE to lean hard into his underdog-luchador narrative in the weeks leading up to Raw’s trip south of the border.

For now, the tournament continues, with more first-round and subsequent matches expected to be revealed as WWE builds toward its September 14 stop in Mexico City. PW Exclusive will continue tracking the bracket as it develops.