5 feuds that will define WWE in 2018
A new year brings new feuds. The glue that holds wrestling programming together, a wrestler in a good feud shoots to the stratosphere, while a bad feud or no feud makes him an afterthought.
It's impossible to predict every feud that will be "year defining" on January 1. Who could have predicted that Tyler Bate and Pete Dunne would have the best trilogy of matches WWE has seen in years or that Braun Strowman would get as hot as he became?
Yet, Braun Strowman vs. Roman Reigns was foreseeable, the logical outcome of his late 2016 booking.
Late 2017, similarly, gave us some clues about feuds that will define the coming year, at least up until WrestleMania. After that, things get blurrier, not least because of the shakeup in April.
There are still reasonable possibilities we can guess at, though, especially in NXT.
#5 Johnny Gargano vs. Tommaso Ciampa
This one is a certainty. In truth, Ciampa's injury following the breakup of #DIY was the best thing that could have happened for this rivalry, because the hold on it has allowed Johnny Gargano to establish himself as NXT's most lovable underdog.
After taking a string of heartbreaking losses, he closed 2017 as the #1 contender for the NXT Championship. It's the perfect setup for Ciampa to return and screw his former partner out of a title win.
The resulting fallout will be nuclear and the feud even more personal than it would have been had it ran its course in 2017. This one could well go for the span of several TakeOvers, with each match bitterer, more brutal than the last. Don't be surprised if many of next year's best feuds list end with this one.