2019: The Numbers Don't Lie 🚨
Everyone has the thing that impacted them most during 2019 when it comes to their enjoyment of the WWE product, for better or worse. For some, it was the continued growth of the women’s division. For others, it’s the ongoing dodgy relationship with Saudi Arabia. For me though, it was undoubtedly the 24/7 Title messing up all of my precious, precious stats.
Frustration over the little green belt aside, it was a year full of good wrestling from every brand under the WWE umbrella, with plenty of ups, downs, comings and goings. And just as I did last year, I catalogued all of this in a mammoth Google Sheet, keeping tabs on wins, losses, titles and more. So, now that 2020 is upon us, let’s put 2019 to bed with a round-up of everything that went on in WWE. There is a full, expanded set of seven articles over on my site, Foul Entertainment, but today Kefin and Jo have let me give the How2Universe the condensed version. Enjoy!
Individuals
In 2018, Finn Balor was the MVP of the year according to the cold, hard numbers, but this year he has been supplanted and surpassed in a lot of ways by the new top boy - Ricochet.
The One and Only had the most wins on both Raw (28) and overall (41), the most matches overall (69), and was second only to Braun Strowman in the number of fellow roster members he had beaten (39 to Braun’s 47). He had the highest matches per month percentage (5.75 matches per month), and he wrestled the highest amount of matches in one month (11 in March). This high frequency did, however, have an impact on his losses too, with a joint-second 15 losses on Raw, and joint-fourth 26 losses for the year overall. Once again, it was a solid year for Seth Rollins. He picked up the silver medal for most categories behind Ricochet, including having the second-highest overall wins (39), second-highest overall matches (56), and the second-highest frequency of matches (4.50 matches per month). He was king of PPV though, with both the most wins (10) and most matches (15). He also holds the distinction of the most title matches with 8.
The stats for the women’s division highlight two standouts. Becky Lynch reigned supreme for both PPV matches (13), overall wins (31) and longest main roster title reign (268+ days as Raw Women’s Champion). But just behind her is Bayley, who joined Becky on 8 PPV wins, but surpassed her in both matches per month (4.17, the highest for a female competitor) and highest number of matches in one month with 8 in April (also the highest for her division).
Tag team dominance was a little more straight forward, as no one can compete with the numbers that the Viking Raiders posted. Ivar and Erik (or Hanson and Rowe as they started the year) had the best win/loss ratio on Raw, winning 77% of their matches, and jointly held the fourth place for most wins overall with 33, behind Kofi Kingston in 3rd with 35.
Kofi Kingston also had the most wins on Smackdown (31), putting him among other roster toppers such as Kay Lee Ray on NXT UK (10 wins), 205 Live’s Humberto Carrillo (14 wins) and Matt Riddle and Io Shirai of NXT (10 wins).
But the wooden spoon this year goes to Cesaro, as the Swiss Superman posted 35 overall losses. Second place Drew McIntyre (28 losses) also has the double dishonour of having the most matches without a single title opportunity (49) and the worst one on one record against a single opponent, losing to Roman Reigns a roster high of 10 times. At least he got some wins though, unlike the newly released Konnor and Viktor, who co-own the worst loss record with 0 wins, 9 losses.
Roster
In total, WWE used 242 contracted wrestlers across 5 brands in 2019, up by 11 from 2018, split 74% male / 26% female. Of that, only 29 managed to wrestle at least one match a month. Joining main roster stars for the first time, like Daniel Bryan, AJ Styles and Randy Orton, are four stars from NXT and NXT UK, namely Adam Cole, Matt Riddle, Pete Dunne and Kassius Ohno, a feat no one on the “developmental” brands managed last year.
On the opposite side of things, 27 wrestlers only managed to wrestle for one month of the year. Some of these were forced by injury (Lars Sullivan, Charlie Morgan), others by releases (Hideo Itami, TJP), and others by the dreaded 24/7 Title (Kane, Ted DiBiase). In terms of other absences, seven members of the roster lost 8 months to injury, including Sheamus, Ruby Riott, Nia Jax and both members of Team Kick in Dakota Kai and Tegan Nox. But Deonna Purazzo actually had the longest leave of absence, appearing once in NXT UK in January before not resurfacing again until Raw in December.
On top of their contracted workers, WWE also used 129 non-contract performers, ranging from celebrities like Colin Jost and Michael Che, to NXT UK roster fillers like Candy Floss, Sam Stoker and Lewis Howley, all the way up to (soon to be) Hall of Famers like Batista.
Debuts were actually down this year, dropping from last year’s 54 to 27. That’s mainly down to WWE not launching a new brand as they did with NXT UK last year, but there were still some high profile debutants such as Kushida, Ilya Dragunov, Isaiah Scott and Piper Niven. There were also some much-publicised returns for the likes of Beth Phoenix and Goldberg. But after a fairly quiet 2018 for big departures, 2019 saw 12 people leave, with the company being particularly rocked by the much-covered exits of Dean Ambrose, Luke Harper and Jordan Myles/ACH.
Titles
A whopping 96 roster members held gold this year, well over a third of the total (can you guess which title was responsible for this surge?). There was no stand out champion this year though, with multiple reigns being impressive for a variety of reasons.
Shayna Baszler spent 352 days of 2019 as NXT Women’s Title, almost matching what Pete Dunne achieved with the WWE UK Title in 2018 by going a whole calendar year with the belt. Pete’s successor as WWE UK champ, Walter, had the second-longest reign of the year at 271 days and counting, although he does hold the worst days per defence ratio of 1 defence every 90 days.
Kofi Kingston’s fantastic run as WWE champion saw him rack up the most title defences with 11. He was also one of 19 repeat champions, with the Revival surprisingly having the most reigns with different belts, holding both the Raw and Smackdown Tag Team Titles at various points of the year alongside a 1-day reign as co-holders of the 24/7 title.
By comparison, Charlotte Flair actually had the worst luck with titles this year, completely against her usual booking as the dominant queen of the division. While she did hold the Smackdown Women’s Title 3 times in 2019, two of her reigns were shorter than a week, with her 2nd reign lasting mere minutes before Bayley cashed in Money in the Bank on her, the shortest title reign of the year.
At least she got to defend her title though - 7 champions made no defence of their gold, either by not having a chance to defend it having won it so late in the year (Rhea Ripley, Andrade), or through being forced to vacate belts due to injury (Hardy Boyz, Rey Mysterio). Also spare a thought for Aleister Black, who made the most title challenges without being a champion (5).
And finally, let’s discuss the bane of my 2019. The 24/7 Title saw 83 separate reigns, which is more than every other belt combined (79). R-Truth’s 30 reigns means not only did he have one of the most title wins and title losses in a single year in WWE history, but he has now surpassed Raven’s 27 reigns as Hardcore Champion to claim the highest amount of reigns with a single belt in company history. The only other person of note is Samir Singh, who co-holds the longest reign with Truth (18 days), and also had the most successful defences (3).
And that will do it! As I said, this is just a small chunk of the data I gathered over the course of 2019. If you want to get into Big Data analysis (you totally should and remember who gave you the idea when you’re making the big bucks), this represents a hell of a little project to pick through, as I imagine there are a thousand weird quirks and trends that even I haven’t picked up on.
If you’d like to see more, you can find more in-depth articles over at Foul Entertainment, where you’ll also find film and gaming podcasts and articles from me and my co-host, Michael Owen (unfortunately no, it isn’t the footballer, but he did once appear on Channel 4’s “Job Interview”, so he’s at least been on TV). And you can find more well-researched-yet-ill-advised opinions on wrestling over on Twitter - @TheGutteridge.