10 WWE Champions Who Vanished Without A Trace After WrestleMania
Disappearing has become a classic former WWE Champion trope, and you should hate it.
WrestleMania is supposed to be the ultimate payoff — the culmination of long-term storytelling, title chases, and character arcs. It’s where legends are made, stories are finished, and new eras begin. But in recent years, a strange trend has emerged: WWE Champions walking into WrestleMania with gold… and then disappearing without a trace.
It used to be rare. A champion might lose the title and stick around to chase it again, cut a promo, or at least get a send-off. But now? It’s becoming almost routine for top stars to vanish from TV entirely after the biggest show of the year. Whether it’s due to injuries, contract situations, creative resets, or just plain bad planning, WWE has developed a habit of letting its champions fade into the background the moment the confetti settles.
Some returns take months. Others never happen at all. And in every case, it leaves fans scratching their heads, wondering why the company would invest so much in a title reign only to ghost us the second it ends.
These wrestlers all took their ball and went home after dropping the strap on the Grandest Stage of Them All...
10. Brock Lesnar - 2022
Brock Lesnar walked into WrestleMania 38 as WWE Champion and left as the loser of a historic title unification match against Roman Reigns. The Biggest WrestleMania Match of All Time was hyped to the moon, but the bout itself was underwhelming — and Lesnar’s post-Mania presence was even more so.
After the loss, Brock didn’t show up on Raw the next night. Or the week after. Or the week after that. In fact, he was gone for months, only resurfacing in July to reignite a feud with Reigns for SummerSlam. For a guy who had just main-evented the biggest show of the year, his disappearance was jarring.
Sure, Brock’s a part-timer — but this was a unification match. You’d think WWE would want to keep him in the mix, even in a limited capacity. Instead, he vanished like a ghost, leaving Roman to carry both belts and fans to wonder what the point of the whole thing even was.