The 5 most irrelevant titles in WWE and NJPW

Belts, there are a lot of them these days. If you’re Austin Aries, then you have quite a few.

WWE and NJPW are the main offenders in the oversaturation of titles. NJPW introduced the IWGP United States title in 2017 and WWE added a mid-card belt to NXT - the North American Championship at last week’s TakeOver: New Orleans.

NJPW has 8 active belts while WWE now has 14. The two companies need to trim the fat, let’s look at five titles that need to either be sidelined or more competition to make them more relevant in today's day and age.

#1 WWE Universal Championship

Since Brock Lesnar has been Universal Champion, the title has been mostly absent on Raw for over a year.

Have Raw’s ratings suffered greatly? Has the show’s quality drastically gone down? Are live events attendance down? No, no and nope.

Raw has done fine without the Universal title on the brand. Coupled with the news that single brand PPV’s are a thing of the past, does WWE even need the red and gold belt? I believe the Universal title should be unified with the WWE Championship.

The unification of the Universal and WWE Championships should be saved for a big event. SummerSlam or Survivor Series (which has the Raw vs Smackdown theme) fit the bill.

After the unification, WWE should go back to the same model they used after the 2002 WWE draft, have the WWE Champion appear on both Raw and Smackdown. The two brands would rotate the top challenger each month. Having just one undisputed champion and both brands wrestlers vying for the title will make championship defenses much more special – and title changes a massive occasion.