When I post a gif of Sami doing one of his beautiful babyface moves, I can usually count on getting at least one comment saying “Why did WWE leave him a heel for so long? Almost six years?!” And while I empathize, putting down Sami’s history has really brought home to me how difficult it can be to get the right window of opportunity for a major turn like that.
Sami turned heel in 2017 to ally with Kevin, leading to the two of them being Daniel Bryan’s opponents in his return match. So he obviously needed to be heel to face Bryan. After that, he struggled with injuries and had to have double shoulder surgery, so that’s 2018 gone.
When he came back in April 2019, he could have simply come back a babyface. But I suspect WWE wanted to give him a more meaty, meaningful babyface turn. So through 2019 Sami grew more and more nihilistic, lost his confidence and stopped wrestling entirely before aligning himself with two wrestlers he saw as more powerful than himself, Intercontinental champion Shinsuke Nakamura and Cesaro. It’s impossible to prove it was a deliberately crafted story with an eventual babyface Sami planned, but by the end of the year Sami’s character was on a trajectory to regain his confidence—and most likely be rejected by Cesaro and Nakamura in the process.
So… yeah, whatever that story may have been, it all came screeching to a halt in early 2020 when WWE entered the Thunderdome. And Sami is the kind of babyface who absolutely, 100% needs to have fans there in order to exist. He could have changed his behavior in the Thunderdome, but for an actual face turn… for that he needed the cheers and chants and singing of a live audience, and they didn’t come back fully until the summer of 2021. By that point it’s likely negotiations were in motion for the Knoxville match.
Which means that Sami coming out of his Knoxville loss after WrestleMania in 2022, his confidence shattered, and deciding to force his way into the Bloodline was about the earliest Sami’s face turn could have happened. That is, if it was to get the kind of detail and slow build it deserved. It was a long road, a five-year road, but he got there as soon as he could.