This Sunday at Heatwave, the WWE will hold a title unification match for the first time in over 3 years when NXT Women’s North American Champion, Zaria, and Women’s Speed Champion, Wren Sinclair, compete in a triple threat match also featuring Kali Armstrong. While no official word has been given, reports indicate that the Speed Titles, initially created for a web-exclusive series on Twitter, will be retired, with the women’s version of the title the first to go.
While WWE has booked numerous unification
matches over the years, in some cases, it’s only a matter of time before the belts are split right back up again. This has been a common occurrence when WWE either ends or restarts the Raw/SmackDown brand split.
At Survivor Series 2001, months after the WCW/ECW Invasion, all of the old WCW championships were essentially merged with their WWE counterparts. At that event, Edge defeated Test to unify the WCW United States Title with the Intercontinental Title. Afterward, Edge would keep the IC belt, and the United States Title would be resurrected almost two years later as a SmackDown-exclusive championship. At that same event, the Dudleys defeated the Hardys to unify the WCW and WWE Tag Team Titles, and there would only be one set of tag champs until the following fall. Of course, who can forget Chris Jericho defeating both Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Rock in the same night at Vengeance 2001 to become the first-ever Undisputed Champion, unifying the WCW and WWE Championships? The old WCW Title (the “big gold belt”) would be brought back the following year as the World Heavyweight Championship.
Over the years, WWE would re-unify and eventually split titles again, namely in 2009 when Miz & Morrison unified both sets of tag titles, and in 2013, when John Cena and Randy Orton re-ignited their classic rivalry and unified the company’s two top belts in a TLC match. You could also look back no further than a few years ago and try to sift through the convoluted, confusing way the Universal Title was retired sometime in 2024.
Uniquely, in 2016, WWE retired the Divas Championship and replaced it with the brand-new Women’s Championship in the thick of the Women’s Revolution. The defending Divas Champion Charlotte won the new title by defeating fellow Four Horsewomen Becky Lynch and Sasha Banks in a triple threat match, putting the Divas era to bed for good.
In some instances, though, when WWE books a unification match, one of the titles goes away for good. To get primed for Heatwave this weekend, let’s take a look at WWE’s most recent unification matches, focusing on those where one of the belts was retired afterward!
Rob Van Dam, belt collector
By the end of 2001, the WWE had merged all of the WCW championships with their WWE equivalents. By the time the summer of 2002 rolled around, they were still featuring their top title, the Intercontinental Title, as well as the European and Hardcore Championships in the undercard. To clear up their glut of gold, reigning IC Champion Rob Van Dam faced European Champion Jeff Hardy in a memorable ladder match on an episode of RAW. Notably, the Intercontinental Title belt was hung above the ring during that match, while the European Title was not.
Then, just over a month later, RVD put the Hardcore Title out of its misery, winning a match against fellow ECW alum Tommy Dreamer on another episode of Raw to retire that championship. Unlike the European Title, the Hardcore Title would make a few sporadic appearances on WWE programming in the years that followed, but neither belt has ever been brought back to active competition.
205 Live Era ends
After being an underrated staple in WCW and early 2000’s WWE, cruiserweight wrestling experienced a bit of a resurgence in 2016 on the heels of the Cruiserweight Classic. It was that tournament, eventually won by T.J. Perkins, that saw legendary wrestlers Zack Sabre Jr. and Kota Ibushi make their only official WWE appearances. Several other stars, like Johnny Gargano and Tommaso Ciampa, would parlay their tournament appearances into future full-time WWE contracts.
Perkins, for winning the tournament, would officially become the WWE Cruiserweight Champion after defeating Gran Metalik in the finals. The title and the entirety of the Cruiserweight division would be featured on Raw in the months that followed, and in November, WWE would begin airing 205 Live, a cruiserweight-exclusive show on the WWE Network, on Tuesday nights following their SmackDown tapings. The division’s popularity would wane in the years that followed, until 205 Live was eventually restructured and the Cruiserweight Title became exclusive to NXT.
In 2020, JD McDonagh, who was wrestling in NXT UK as Jordan Devlin at the time, was unable to travel to the U.S. due to COVID restrictions, so a tournament was held to crown an interim champion. El Hijo del Fantasma, better known in WWE as Santos Escobar, would win the tournament and eventually beat Devlin to become the Undisputed NXT Cruiserweight Champion.
Then, in late 2021, WWE decided to drop 205 Live and retire the Cruiserweight Title by unifying it with the North American Title. At New Year’s Evil in January 2022, North American Champion Carmelo Hayes defeated Cruiserweight Champion Roderick Strong, putting an end to the Cruiserweight division’s 5+ year resurgence.
NXT UK folds
After retiring the Cruiserweight Title in the first few days of 2022, the WWE did some more unifying later in the year when NXT UK came to an end. After struggling to stay afloat because of the pandemic, there were rumors that NXT UK would be rebranded as NXT Europe, but as we know, that new brand never came to be.
In September, the WWE decided to unify all NXT UK Championships with the NXT proper titles. Three huge unification matches all took place at the Worlds Collide special, filmed at the Performance Center on Labor Day weekend in 2022.
Pretty Deadly outlasted the Creed Brothers, Briggs & Jensen, and Gallus in a Fatal 4 Way tag match to unify the two sets of tag team titles, NXT Champion Bron Breakker beat NXT UK Champion Tyler Bate to unify those titles, and in the match that perhaps carries the most relevance heading into this weekend, NXT Women’s Champion Mandy Rose beat Meiko Satamura and Blair Davenport in a triple threat match to unify the top women’s titles in NXT and NXT UK. Does Mandy Rose’s win, after she entered the unification match with the title that was higher in the WWE hierarchy, mean Zaria is most likely to walk out of Heatwave with a win?
One set of women’s tag titles is enough
The most recent unification match in WWE took place a little over three years ago when two sets of women’s tag team titles were merged into one. In response to the ever-growing popularity of women’s wrestling in WWE, the Women’s Tag Team Titles were introduced in early 2019. Sasha Banks and Bayley would become inaugural champions after outlasting five other teams in an Elimination Chamber match. Since then, 41 different women have held one of the titles, comprising 37 different title reigns.
Less than two years later, at the completion of the first-ever Women’s Dusty Rhodes Tag Team Classic, NXT GM William Regal awarded the brand-new NXT Women’s Tag Team Titles to Dakota Kai and Raquel Gonzalez, now known as Raquel Rodriguez. These titles wouldn’t last too long on the developmental brand due to a lack of depth in the women’s division at the time. In 2023, then champions Alba Fyre and Isla Dawn were drafted to SmackDown and brought the NXT tag gold with them. They would eventually have a run-in with the WWE Women’s Tag Team Champions, Nia Jax and Shayna Baszler, and the unification match won by Nia and Shayna went down in June.
What history tells us about Heatwave
Looking for patterns from the last quarter-century, it would appear Zaria should be considered the favorite to come out on top in the unification match at Heatwave. In most cases, the wrestler or team heading into a unification match holding what’s considered to be the superior title usually ends up winning, with Pretty Deadly at Worlds Collide in 2022 being one of the lone exceptions. Not only that, but in one of the only triple-threat unification matches to date, Mandy Rose, who again walked in with the title higher up on the WWE totem pole, outlasted Meiko Satomura and Blair Davenport.
What do you think, Cagesiders? Will Zaria continue the trend at Heatwave on Sunday and win the unification match? What should NXT do about the Men’s Speed Title? Let us know in the comments!
