12 Times WWE Brutally CANCELLED World Championship Reigns
Those times WWE changed its mind: featuring Muhammad Hassan, Vader, and, genuinely, Tugboat (!).
Professional wrestling is fake.
Apologies if this is the first you're hearing of that - if it is, then perhaps you ought to ask your parents about Father Christmas - but it's true: it's fake. It's fiction. It's not real. It is unlike any other sport because Triple H, Tony Khan, or somebody else has already decided, to a certain degree anyway, how successful your career will be. It's unthinkable when you compare it to any other industry; imagine if Zinedine Zidane told Cristiano Ronaldo he was only allowed to score a limited number of goals.
(No, you had to Google a comparable sports reference.)
Similarly, professional wrestling championships are fake. Look at the IWGP Heavyweight Championship. It's the most prestigious in the business, but its lineage has been clouded by terrible post-pandemic judgment because they seriously thought that EVIL was the solution to end their creative slump. Shorter, snappier reigns have replaced the dominant runs that were popularised by Hiroshi Tanahashi, Kazuchika Okada, Antonio Inoki, and others. Crowning Konosuke Takeshita for a paltry 83 days really wasn't worth it.
Similar misjudgment has often followed WWE's bevvy of World Championships since the sixties, a lineage that includes Vince McMahon and Jinder Mahal but not Razor Ramon, Mr Perfect, Rick Rude, Roddy Piper, and, well...
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.