Roman Reigns Just Reached His Biggest Career Milestone Yet

January 18, 2023, 3:00pm

Roman Reigns’ run as WWE Universal Champion officially reached 871 days on Wednesday, making it the longest championship reign in WWE history in the past three decades. He initially won the title at the 2020 Payback pay-per-view and has since defended it 25 times, which included unifying it with the WWE Championship to rename it the Undisputed WWE Universal Championship. Reigns broke the record previously held by Gunther (fka Walter), who held the NXT United Kingdom Championship for 870 days from 2019-21.

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Reigns’ next big milestone will be hitting the 1,000-day mark as world champion, something that has happened only five times in the company’s history. That accomplishment would put Reigns in the record books alongside the likes of Bruno Sammartino, Bob Backlund, Hulk Hogan and Pedro Morales as the longest-reigning world champions in WWE history.

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Despite Reigns dominating WWE’s main event scene for the better part of a decade, he explained in an interview with The Ringer last November that he’s the current run as the “halfway” point of his WWE run. Reigns signed a new WWE deal last year that enables him to work significantly fewer dates, resulting in him working just 23 matches after WrestleMania 38.

“I’m right in the middle of it,” Reigns said. “People want these interviews, they want to do these documentaries. But this is the bottom of the third inning to me. We’re in the second quarter of the Super Bowl right now.”

“We’ve done this in turbulent times, through a pandemic, through the biggest change of all time in this business,” he added. “And we’ve done it seamlessly. We’ve done it without falter. Down the road, 20 years from now when we start giving out all these crazy details of the inside, inside, there’s just going to be even deeper respect for the performances that we’ve been putting on. Man, it’s been a hell of a journey, but it’s only begun. It’s going to get bigger.”

Reigns’ next title defense will be at the Royal Rumble on Jan. 28 when he’ll take on Kevin Owens. “The Tribal Chief” has successfully retained against KO on three separate occasions since this reign began, but their initial feud ended back in early 2021.