The Day The WWE United States Championship Died

As noted, this is not a Dolph Ziggler hit piece. It's not even really designed to dig out the United States Championship, but there comes a time for pragmatic assessment and that time was probably about ten minutes before the belt was reintroduced in 2003.

Won cheaply by Eddie Guerrero in a tournament final that summer, the nature of the finish (Rhyno swerve turned on partner Chris Benoit to gift the gold to 'Latino Heat') set the tone for the title going forward. Yes, Guerrero was getting all the way over as a cheating tweener at the time, but the implication of the booking against Benoit seemed to be that "this to be a workers title for your favourite workers, like the Intercontinental Title used to be before we f*cked it". That was 18 years ago, and - not unlike a lot of the product - nothing's changed since. Following similar patterns up and down the card, it's getting tougher and tougher to imagine a WWE midcard title that isn't bereft of life at this point.

If you printed out every article ever written about the decline of the IC strap, you'd have a stack of papers taller than Jordan Omogbehin, the man AJ Styles sidled up to when he lost the belt in 2020. If you printed out 8x10s of every wrestler that said they were going to arrest that decline, it'd be taller still. There are no more saviours of the WWE midcard belts, regardless of how occasionally fantastic the matches are. The only man that could is 75 years old and evidently hasn't given a flying f*ck for about a third of that time.

Look elsewhere on Raw or SmackDown and you'll see more of the same.

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