Bron Breakker officially unified the NXT and NXT Championships on Sunday afternoon at Worlds Collide, defeating Tyler Bate in the show’s main event. Late in the bout, Bate hit his Tyler Driver ’97 only for Breakker to kick out. Breakker then nailed his Gorilla Press Powerslam, but Bate had his leg on the ropes. The final sequence ended with Bate’s bounce of the ropes into a clothesline getting countered with a thunderous Spear, allowing Breakker to pick up the win.
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Both Breakker and Bate entered the night as two-time champions. Breakker first won the NXT Championship mere months after his television debut by toppling Tommaso Ciampa at New Year’s Evil in January. He dropped the title to Dolph Ziggler in shocking fashion at Roadblock in March, only to win it back on the April 4 episode of Monday Night Raw.
Meanwhile, Bate was the inaugural UK Champion by winning the United Kingdom Championship Tournament in January 2017. He lost it to Pete Dunne later that year at NXT TakeOver: Chicago and wouldn’t successfully win it back until winning a recent tournament for the vacated championship (Ilja Dragunov had to relinquish it due to injury) in July.ย
The main event was the last of three unification matches between the NXT and NXT UK rosters as the latter will now shut down and be rebooted as NXT Europe next year. Mandy Rose combined the NXT & NXT UK Women’s Championships by pinning Blair Davenport (the match also featured UK Champion Meiko Satomura), while Pretty Deadly unified the tag titles.ย
“So some of it, like everything with the WWE and NXT, that pipeline is always fluid,” Shawn Michaels explained when the reboot was announced. “It’s going to be one of those situations where we’re going to have a lot of representation going into Worlds Collide. It’s what NXT has always been and that is to be a pipeline for the WWE in support of RAW and SmackDown. That process is going to continue. We’re going to use the UK talent that we can to go into Worlds Collide and keep that representation out there for as long as we can. And as we move things over here in the process, we’ll make all those decisions in 2023 about who’s a part of NXT Europe and who continues to stay here in NXT in hopes of getting a main roster call up.”
