Why Is Roman Reigns’ Universal WWE Championship Still Called “Undisputed?”

WWE’s recent booking decisions surrounding Roman Reigns and its championships have reportedly caused some confusion backstage lately. Back at WrestleMania 38, Reigns defeated Brock Lesnar to unify the WWE and Universal Championships into the Undisputed WWE Universal Championship. He then proceeded to carry around both titles for a full year and after surpassing 1,000 consecutive days as champion he was awarded a new singular, golden title with “Undisputed WWE Universal Championship” engraved across the front. But by that point there was already a problem as the “undisputed” label typically means that there is only one world champion and nobody else can lay claim to that prestigious honor. This is the same logic used in combat sports like MMA and boxing and WWE previously used it when the WWE and WCW World Championships were unified in the early 2000s. So once Seth Rollins won the new World Heavyweight Championship at Night of Champions, Reigns’ “undisputed” label no longer made sense. 

The issue was compounded when Asuka was given a new version of the Raw Women’s Championship on the latest edition of Friday Night SmackDown, renaming it the WWE Women’s Championship. And while this clears up the issue of the Raw and SmackDown women’s titles currently being on opposite brands (Rhea Ripley’s SmackDown Women’s Championship is expected to get a similar update as early as tonight), there was even more confusion when the word “undisputed” was spotted on the faceplate of Asuka’s new title. Asuka has since poked fun at the complaints, while WWE.com still has it labeled as the “WWE Women’s Championship.”

Sean Ross Sapp dropped a report via Fightful Select over the weekend regarding this, with sources in the company telling him that they’ve also pointed out that “undisputed” keeps getting misused. Those concerns have apparently been “dismissed.”

“One point of frustration we heard from WWE sources was a simple misuse of the term ‘undisputed’ in two cases. Roman Reigns’ title is being referred to as an undisputed title despite Seth Rollins being a world champion. Asuka’s new championship has ‘undispute’” on the front of it, despite Rhea Ripley also being a women’s champion. One higher-up in WWE said ‘that’s admittedly confusing. I don’t know why there is an insistence on doing that, and a lot of people have brought that up and it’s been dismissed,’” Sapp wrote.