8 WWE Title Reigns That Were Completely Wasted

5. Antonio Cesaro And The United States Championship

Cesaro US Title
WWE

It feels like an absolute lifetime ago now, but back when he still called Antonio the Swiss Superman won the United States Championship. After defeating Santino Marella on the SummerSlam 2012 pre-show, Cesaro went on to hold the strap for 239 days before losing it to Kofi Kingston on an episode of Monday Night RAW.

Maybe it was the lack of roster depth at the time, but Cesaro defended the belt on pay-per-view against Zack Ryder, Justin Gabriel, R-Truth (twice) and The Miz. Not a great list of opponents at all, but Cesaro was dominant enough to look like he could hold on to the title for a long, long time.

The problem was that the company didn't seem particularly invested in him. Most of his matches came out of that old 'so and so has pinned the United States Champion' rubbish, and were as thrown together as it gets. When he finally lost the title to Kingston, the whole thing felt like it had been an underwhelming experiment that did nothing for anybody.

Cesaro's run needed more competition, more hard fought victories. He needed the US Championship Open Challenge, basically.

Contributor
Contributor

Born in the middle of Wales in the middle of the 1980's, John can't quite remember when he started watching wrestling but he has a terrible feeling that Dino Bravo was involved. Now living in Prague, John spends most of his time trying to work out how Tomohiro Ishii still stands upright. His favourite wrestler of all time is Dean Malenko, but really it is Repo Man. He is the author of 'An Illustrated History of Slavic Misery', the best book about the Slavic people that you haven't yet read. You can get that and others from www.poshlostbooks.com.