10 Wrestlers Who Were Only World Champion Because Of The Brand Split

The WWE brand split of 2002 had many pros and cons during its time in place. Sure, the notion of separate brands had been slowly phased out over time, but it wasn’t until the unification of the WWE Championship and the WWE World Heavyweight Championship in late 2013 that the idea of two different World Champions was brought to an end.

One of the good things about the initial split is that it gave certain talents chance to challenge for a World Championship when they may have previously been stuck in the mid-card, regularly banging their heads on the company’s apparent glass ceiling.

Of course, the likes of John Cena and Dave Batista were always destined to become World Champions at some point, and Triple H was always likely to have an additional 8 reigns (I wish I was joking on that figure), but there were plenty of superstars who you can’t help but feel would’ve found the World Championship evasively out of their grasp were it not for the brand split.

Just to clarify, too, this list doesn’t count the WWE’s relaunched version of ECW, instead it just focusses on talent who held either the WWE Championship or the WWE World Heavyweight Championship.

So with that said, here’s 10 superstars who would’ve found it near-impossible to become a WWE World Champion had Raw and Smackdown not been positioned as two separate entities way back in 2002.

Now JBL is arguably the first name that will come to the lips of many when considering talents who would never have been a World Champion had the WWE brand split never happened.

John Bradshaw Layfield actually made for a rather great heel champ during his run with the WWE Championship, taking part in some brutal matches as well as sneaking out wins in typically underhand ways.

Despite having a 280-day reign as World Champion, it's hard to believe that the Wrestling God's ascension to being "the man" (even if it was "just" on Smackdown) would ever have become a reality.

Thanks to the brand split, Bradshaw managed to break away from the tag team division. The first ever draft saw him split from long-time partner Farooq, but it would be a year later that the APA would reform and again break up in order for the WWE to push Bradshaw as a solo star under the JBL gimmick.

If Raw and Smackdown focussed on the same talent, there's no chance that JBL would've been become a World Champion. As Paul Heyman put it to JBL at the first ECW One Night Stand show, "The only reason you were Champion for a year was because Triple H didn't wanna work Tuesdays!"