Roundtable: Worst Championship Belts

In this edition of The Wrestling Estate roundtable, we discuss the worst championship belts in wrestling history.

WWE Raw and SmackDown Heavyweight Championships (2015-present): I’ve already admitted I like simplicity, but I also like to see good risks being taken with respect to wrestling belt designs. It’s almost as if someone said, “Just take a standard championship belt and stick the WWE logo in the middle of it.” Well that’s all fine and good, but then as years have passed, it has almost become a template for nearly every belt in the company. That logic has already bled into the women’s titles and it would not shock me at all if midcard titles soon met a similar fate. Every belt should be different because it gives each one unique appeal. There should be a reason wrestler “x” would rather have the IC title over the US title, and making them different entities helps. These belts are too cookie cutter to me. Just looking at the front of it, it’s almost as if they’d be a better fit for a ring than a championship belt. Oh wait, you can buy those! – Jack Goodwillie

Ever since John Cena debuted the spinning belt, the WWE Championship has featured a big, stupid ugly “W” surrounded by a shit design. – Juan Bautista

The design of the WWE Championship with the black strap is ok. It’s in my collection. But I hate the fact that the titles don’t have a distinct design anymore. They are literally the same titles, but with different strap colors. The Universal Championship having the red design is just awful. – Neal Wagner

This big red belt is something out of a 10 year old’s WWE 2K custom belt profile. This belt can be burned. – Juan Bautista

The Spinning WWE Championship: I hated this championship in 2005 just as much as I do now. It makes a title meant to be the most prestigious in the world look like a toy. – Sam Gladen

This hunk of crap outlived its usefulness by YEARS. The fact that anyone not Cena had to carry it is an insult. CM Punk deserved a better belt. – Jenna Leigh

As if you needed another reason to despise John Cena, he ushered in this ridiculous design for supposedly the richest prize in the sport. – John Corrigan

Raw Tag Team Titles (copper version): These two shiny pennies look good scaled down on action figures, but the idea that the greatest two-man wrestling teams in the world would pin aspirational pictures of these belts to their vision boards seems unlikely. – David Gibb

Current WWE Men’s Tag Team Championships: Unlike back in the day when Raw and SmackDown had different designs for their titles, today they’re exactly the same design, except one is painted red and the other blue. – Juan Bautista

Even though WWE has tweaked them a bit and lost the copper aesthetic, these are still just hideous. – Jenna Leigh

WWE Women’s Tag Team Championships: Maybe it’s PTSD, but this title reminds me more of the Divas Championship than the WWE tag belts that they are supposed to. – Sam Gladen

WWE Divas’ Title (“Butterfly Belt”): This design was torn straight from the cover of a Lisa Frank homework folder and perfectly embodied an era where the female side of the roster got minimal respect. It was an awful replacement for the Women’s Championship, which looked like a classic wrestling belt and had a lineage. – David Gibb

The design alone tells you all you need to know about how the women were seen at this time. They were given a toy…a trinket. Just hideous – and my favorite color is pink! – Jenna Leigh

Unless Jillian Hall’s mole gets plastered on a belt, this will go down as the worst championship design in the history of pro wrestling. – John Corrigan

I totally get why the Divas Championship came to be. What I never understood was a.) Who approved this shit? and b.) Why did THIS belt take precedence over a much cleaner, better looking Women’s Championship? It’s for reasons like this everybody knows the “Women’s Revolution” was a fucking farce and that WWE’s desire to market it like women’s suffrage in 1920 was completely preposterous given the company’s history (that’s a rant for another time, however). I mean, just look at it. Wayyyy too much going on with this design, even if it actually began to grow on me as gals like AJ Lee and Paige began to make it mean something. It certainly has a case for one of the worst designs of all time. – Jack Goodwillie

IWGP Junior Heavyweight Championship: The title looks similar to the Gift of the Gods Championship, but where Lucha Underground’s title embraces its silliness, New Japan’s title is meant to be the highest possible honor for a junior heavyweight. – Sam Gladen

WWF Light Heavyweight Championship: The WWF’s under-225 league never caught fire, and the sad shape of the title may have been one of the many reasons fans never dug the division. The tinny plates looked like they came from the toy store (and not the nice one), and it’s plain, narrow red strap gave it a cheap, homemade look. – David Gibb

X-Division Championship (2013-2015): Shoutout to the Ring of Honor Television Championship and the WWECW Championship and Jeff Hardy’s TNA Heavyweight Championship for also being completely hideous, but I have a special hatred for when a company changes a perfectly good design into a crappy one. The second TNA X-Division Championship nearly made my favorites list. The original one that just had the red ‘X’ on it even had its charm. But this belt… it reeks of a direct motion from Dixie Carter to try to be more like WWE. It’s almost as if they stole the design of the WWE Intercontinental Championship I love so much and crudely tried to chisel an ‘X’ into it. X-Division Championships were always synonymous with the color red. Why fix what wasn’t broken? – Jack Goodwillie

WWECW Silver Eagle Championship: This title was a replacement to the old-school ECW Championship during the resurrection of the brand in 2006. The title was held by the likes of Jack Swagger, Christian and Ezekiel Jackson. Enough said there, but the championship from a distance looked like straight silver plates on a leather strap. You couldn’t make out any of the design of the actual title. – Neal Wagner

It wasn’t even gold! Who competes for silver? – John Corrigan

TNA World Heavyweight Championship (debuted in 2007): This title to me is the same as the WWECW title mentioned above – it’s gold with no design from a distance with a black strap attached to it. For this being the first REAL World Championship for TNA, it didn’t present well on TV and just looks horrible. They finally got it right years later with a bigger title during the Hogan/Bischoff Era with the TNA logo in the middle in blue – it was the title more known during Bobby Roode’s reign. It was GLORIOUS! – Neal Wagner