WWE World Tag Team Championship (1971-2010)

The World Tag Team Championship lineage began in October 2002, when WWE moved the existing tag title to Raw and created a separate WWE Tag Team Championship for SmackDown. From that point until 2010, the World Tag Team Championship was the main men’s tag title for the Raw brand.

This title was first introduced in the World Wide Wrestling Federation (WWWF) on June 3, 1971, as the WWWF World Tag Team Championship. It was created so the company could control its own world-level tag belts after older titles left the territory. In October 1979, the company shortened its name to World Wrestling Federation (WWF), and the belts became the WWF Tag Team Championship, keeping the same champions and history.

In late 1983, as the promotion went national and built toward WrestleMania, the title took on the fuller name WWF World Tag Team Championship, matching the company’s push as a world-wide promotion. On May 6, 2002, after the move from “WWF” to “WWE,” the title was renamed the WWE Tag Team Championship while the first brand split was getting started.

On Raw, the World Tag Team Championship became part of many big stories. Early champions included The Un-Americans (Lance Storm and Christian), Hurricane and Kane, and Booker T and Goldust. Those teams helped set the tone for what Raw’s tag division looked like in the early years of the brand split.

Over time, the belts were tied to main-event groups and long-running feuds. Members of Evolution, especially Ric Flair and Batista, used the titles to show that their stable controlled most of Raw’s gold. Teams like La Résistance, Rob Van Dam and Kane, and Chris Jericho with different partners also held the belts. Sometimes the titles helped lift newer teams, and other times they were used to keep big singles stars in the mix between world title runs.

In the mid and late 2000s, the World Tag Team Championship kept shifting as the roster changed. Teams like Cade and Murdoch gave the division a more classic tag team feel. The reunited D-Generation X (Triple H and Shawn Michaels) held the belts and used them to add a major prize to their tag feuds.

Because of a talent exchange, wrestlers from the ECW brand sometimes challenged for the titles too, even though the championship was still officially a Raw belt on paper.

On April 5, 2009, at WrestleMania 25, Raw’s World Tag Team Champions John Morrison and The Miz faced SmackDown’s WWE Tag Team Champions Primo and Carlito in a winner-take-all match. Primo and Carlito won, and WWE started treating the two championships as a single set under the name the Unified WWE Tag Team Championship.

From that point on, one team held and carried both sets of belts, and the champions could appear across Raw, SmackDown, and ECW. Even so, WWE still kept the two title histories separate in the record books, with both lineages continuing side by side.

Only a few teams held the unified titles. After Primo and Carlito, Chris Jericho became the key figure. He first held the unified belts with Edge, then continued with Big Show as “Jeri-Show” after Edge was injured. Later in 2009, D-Generation X finally had an official run as unified champions after winning a TLC match. In early 2010, ShoMiz (The Miz and Big Show) used the belts to appear on multiple shows and keep the tag division in focus.

The final champions in the original 1971 lineage were The Hart Dynasty (Tyson Kidd and David Hart Smith). They defeated ShoMiz on the April 26, 2010 episode of Raw to win the unified titles. It was a fitting moment, since they were carrying on the Hart family name, which had been tied to some of the tag division’s biggest years in the 1980s and 1990s.

On August 16, 2010, Bret Hart appeared on Raw in an authority role and presented The Hart Dynasty with new tag team belts. At that point, WWE quietly retired the World Tag Team Championship and kept only the newer WWE Tag Team Championship lineage going forward. The “Unified” label was dropped, and the modern WWE Tag Team Championship became the single active men’s tag title for the company.