12 Times WWE Brutally CANCELLED World Championship Reigns

12. Wade Barrett

The image above this text depicts Wade Barrett under his King Barrett guise, which is apt considering he was royally screwed the second he won the first season of NXT.

As the winner of WWE's hottest new toy, Barrett had to be guaranteed main roster screen time to prove that NXT wasn't just another money-burning bust, but he wasn't guaranteed main roster success, as was proven by WWE squandering the Barrett-led Nexus. Their debut was earnestly one of the best in history and gave WWE an easy layup for what looked like a difficult summer ahead, but a SummerSlam loss to the John Cena-fronted Team WWE left them dead in the water. Subsequent back-to-back WWE Title losses to Randy Orton and being quite literally buried under a flood of steel chairs left Wade in unfortunate territory.

Still, he remained heavily factored into WWE's main event vision for 2011, and a planned Money in the Bank victory was going to be his ticket to the top. In a 2016 interview with WhatCulture, Wade Barrett confirmed that he had been Vince McMahon's original choice to be Mr Money in the Bank in the match that Daniel Bryan eventually won, with the switch being made an hour before the show, and with no previous winner having failed their cash-in, it was generally assumed that Wade would have put the W in WWE Champion.

Instead, Daniel Bryan cashed in successfully on the same show that had Barrett losing a Tables match to Randy Orton. Ouch.