Triple H Unveils New WWE Championship On Raw

Company to crown a new World Heavyweight Champion at Night of Champions next month.

by Scott Carlson
WWE World Heavyweight Championship
WWE.com

If you have felt like Roman Reigns and his part-time schedule has taken both the WWE Championship and WWE Universal Championship out of play for the past year-plus, then WWE has a solution for you... you just might not like it.

Triple H acknowledged that fans "deserve better" than to have an absent top titleholder, but rather than make Reigns defend his titles or maybe split them up, he announced Monday night that WWE was resurrecting the World Heavyweight Championship, unveiling a new title belt on Raw. Once Reigns is drafted to a brand in the next week, the brand without Roman will become the home of the new WHC.

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Hunter also announced that WWE will crown a new world champion at Night of Champions in Saudi Arabia, though he didn't elaborate on how that presumed tournament would work.

Reigns consolidated both world titles at WrestleMania 38 and has continued to carry both championship belts around since then, suggesting that the two could and would eventually be separated again. Some fans suggested that Cody Rhodes could have challenged for just the WWE Championship at Mania 39, which would split the titles up, allow Rhodes to "finish the story" and preserve Roman's two-plus-year title reign with the Universal title.

Instead, WWE is inexplicably creating a third world championship with zero history.

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WWE's version of the World Heavyweight Championship was created in 2002 when then-Raw GM Eric Bischoff literally handed the Big Gold Belt to Triple H because Brock Lesnar had absconded to SmackDown with the Undisputed WWE Championship. That version existed until 2013 when John Cena and Randy Orton had a unification match to establish one world champion for the company.

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Contributor

Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fortunately became a fan in time for WrestleMania III and came back as a fan after a long high school hiatus before WM XIV. Monday nights in the Carlson household are reserved for viewing Raw -- for better or worse.