10 Ugliest championship belts in wrestling history
DISCLAIMER: The belts are ranked according to looks alone, not prestige, titleholders, etc.
To say that fans reacted to the WWE Universal Championship belt unveiling at SummerSlam badly a few years ago, would be an understatement. Even Seth Rollins admonished the Brooklyn audience later via Twitter. The reaction was so venomous that the crowd could be heard chanting about the Universal Championship belt for most of Finn Balor and Seth Rollins’ match at SummerSlam.
This brought into mind all the other extremely ugly championship belts we’ve had in wrestling over the years, so here is a list of the 10 ugliest wrestling belts of all time.
To be fair, with most WWE belts now looking the same, we can lump them in with the Universal Championship.
Will the WWE Universal Championship make the cut?
10: WWE Divas Championship
We start this list with the infamous ‘Butterfly belt’. For the eight years that it existed, the WWE Divas Championship has been the most hated championship belt in recent WWE history. Loathed from almost the day it was introduced, the belt has a pink butterfly on the main plate and the word divas written across it.
Even though women like Paige and Nikki Bella have held it, this belt has come to signify an era when WWE didn’t really care about women’s wrestling, repeatedly signing women for their looks instead of ability.
9: ROH Television Championship
The Ring of Honor Television Championship first debuted in 2010, and ROH’s secondary title has since been held by the likes of Sami Zayn, Tommaso Ciampa, Jay Lethal, and Adam Cole. This version of the championship belt was introduced in 2012 and just looks awful.
It looks like a badly done version of the classic 80s belts but just badly done and terribly outdated looking. Apart from that, its weird shape looks even stranger when it’s around a wrestler’s waist.
8: John Cena’s spinning WWE Championship
Any time that you make a championship belt based on one particular wrestler’s gimmick, it ends up being a problem. In this case, it was an ugly problem, literally.
John Cena’s spinning WWE Championship belt has received a lot of hate from fans over the years and rightfully so. Even though the belt suited Cena’s thug rapper gimmick at the time, the belt looked ridiculous any time another wrestler held it. The spinning part was the part that made this belt ugly, you say? Well, WWE made it stop spinning at a point, and it just looked even more ridiculous then.
7: Edge’s Rated-R World Title
The second spinning title on this list, this belt just proves the weird fascination WWE had with spinning title belts during the Ruthless Aggression Era – another great idea from the Vincent Kennedy McMahon, the same mind that brought us Mae Young giving birth to a hand and the Brawl For All.
This belt was sort of a modified version of Cena’s spinning belt and it had Edge’s Rated-R logo instead of the WWE logo. The belt just looked downright ugly and belts such as this that have a wrestler’s gimmick to them have no credibility whatsoever. I mean, this belt didn’t even have the WWE logo on the main plate.
6: Taz’s FTW Championship in ECW
Taz introduced the FTW Heavyweight Championship in 1998 when he couldn’t get a shot at the ECW Championship after returning from injury. Taz defended the FTW Heavyweight Championship while billing himself as the "real" World champion. The belt stands in the same league as the Million Dollar Championship as an officially unrecognized title.
The belt was clearly made in haste with Taz taking an old title and going to work at it using some tape and marker. The title just doesn’t look like it has any prestige, something that a wrestler would fight to win.