Too Many Championships is Exactly What WWE Wants

Any professional athlete worth their salt ultimately wants one thing: GOLD. Solid, dripping, glistening, existence-validating gold. It is one of the key pieces that makes watching athletes for us normies so relatable and rewarding. Even if we can’t have their skill, we all want to win and be rewarded for a victory. It truly is the primal sense of greed and accomplishment that unites us all. Everybody wants that tingle of winning.

So it is perfectly understandable why the WWE would want to have a billion and half championships. With WWE’s developmental NXT brand crowning their first North American Champion come TakeOver: New Orleans and a rumour that 205 Live will introduce a Cruiserweight Tag Team Championship sometime after WrestleMania, there will soon be enough gold in the company to assuage even 2004 Triple H.

If both these titles are welded into life, that will leave fifteen active titles in the company. Even at the height of the Invasion, when the then WWF inherited and recognised a few WCW titles and had its largest and deepest roster, they never had more than eleven belts active. Recognising their Aztec-like horde of gold, the ‘E went to work quickly unifying and deactivating many of them over the next several months.

There are a number of arguments to be made about having too many titles. The first and most immediate for many is that having so many devalues all of them. I mean, how can we relate to these athletes struggling to get championships when they can trip, fall, and land on one holding up their soap and shampoo in the shower at any given point in time?

Another argument is that it flat out just doesn’t make sense. Having so many belts across shows post-Invasion was necessary because of roster size. It gave each division so much depth and gave all of us guaranteed fresh match-ups. Now, the straining roster sizes leave us with the same title feuds week after week, month after month until we’re so bloody tired of seeing them all, we don’t even care who is champion. Both of these arguments are incredibly fair and hold a great deal of weight if one wants to do right by wrestling.

Except the WWE isn’t a wrestling company. They are a sports-entertainment empire.

So screw your rules and screw mine.

The competitors are not wrestlers, they are performers. The athletes are not workers, they are Superstars. And this is the core of why even though too many titles may overall be a bad thing, it works perfectly for their model. The WWE is here to make stars, larger than life characters that sell tickets and make ya wanna buy tha merch. An easy way to get consumers to buy in is to use something already established.

What better way to sell an athlete than have them rack up a bunch of gold?

In an era where star power is dwindling and no one Superstar can truly be considered a ‘draw’ (although Ronda Rousey may make me eat those words), having so many titles around and putting them on people is a quick and dirty way to build up not only credibility, but marketability.

I hear what you’re saying. It should not be hardware and how much one has that determines who fans should get behind, but rather, who the fans get behind should determine how much hardware one should have. I agree with every fibre of my 125 lb scrawny frame. But we are already fans. We love this art form and will buy into our star of choice for whatever reason, titles need not apply. Unfortunately, racking up so many championship reigns is not for us.

It is for Mattel, trying to figure out who to use in their upcoming toy line. It is for Yukes, determining whether to include a Superstar on the next 2K roster. It is for arenas and events, so that they can sell tickets to the casual pedestrian by promoting R-Truth as a former United States and Tag Team Champion with no one questioning the emptiness of either reign. None of these ‘non-fan’ positions care whether the title reigns have true credibility. They just know by buying into so much gold, they don’t feel cheated. Even in the modern day when everyone knows wrestling is predetermined and an act, nobody wants to lose.

Everybody wants that tingle of winning. The only thing that tingles more than GOLD is GREEN.