10 Most Undeserving Winners Of Vacant Wrestling Titles

It’s always interesting to see how the WWE deals with vacated championships, and this week on Raw the case was no different.

With Finn Balor’s shoulder injury forcing him to relinquish the Universal Championship, it was decided that we’d see a series of one-on-one qualifying matches, with the winners advancing to a Fatal 4-Way which will determine our next champion.

That two-stage tournament may seem a little weak, especially when compared with some of the lengthy brackets we've seen in the past, but it’ll still make the eventual winner a far worthier champion than some of the names that are featured on this list.

Over the years, we've seen vacant titles won willy-nilly in all sorts of undeserving ways, from matches that finished in debatable circumstances all the way to wrestlers being literally handed the previously-unclaimed belt.

From the dubious to the diabolical, this article looks back at ten such instances as we recount the most undeserving winners of vacant championships in WWE history.

When Marc Mero won the Intercontinental Championship on Sep. 23, 1996, he did so after emerging victorious in a 16-man, month-long tournament to decide who would claim the vacant title.

That may sound like an impressive feat, but in actuality it wasn’t quite as straightforward as that.

Mero had hardly covered himself in glory in his route to the tournament final. His first-round victory over Steve Austin arrived via DQ after his opponent had manhandled the referee, and in the semi-final stage he only beat Owen Hart after bludgeoning Owen with his own protective cast.

Then once he’d eventually made it to the final, prior to scoring the victory off his Shooting Star Press, he’d lamped Faarooq with Sunny's purse to make it a hat-trick of shady victories.

Admittedly Faarooq had been the one to initially introduce the purse into the match, but either way, this wasn’t necessarily the most flattering of ways to win a tournament for a vacant title.