5 Dumbest WWE tag team names


When you give teams and stables bad names, of course, the fans aren’t going to give a damn.

Just like a singles wrestler, a tag team needs a good name to help them stand-out from the others. It’s much harder for tag teams to convince the audience to tune into them because you have more people involved in the matches. In a straight singles feud, the wrestlers only need to worry about their chemistry with one another. With tag teams, you then have to add the element of your partner into the mix, complicating matters much further.

To that end, a lot of elements have to go together to make a tag team successful, and it starts with them having a good name. When most wrestling fans look back at wrestling’s illustrious history, some of the best acts of all time were tag teams or factions. These units had collective names that identified them that way and had some kind of underlying meaning about them.

Some of the best names include the Hart Foundation, The Road Warriors/Legion of Doom, Demolition, The Shield, Evolution, the Fabulous Freebirds, the British Bulldogs, the Brothers of Destruction, just to name a few.

But WWE and WCW weren’t the only ones to come up with great tag team names. Other great names used around the world include the Kings of Wrestling (Cesaro & Chris Hero), the Miracle Violence Connection (Terry Gordy & Steve Williams), Bad Influence (Christopher Daniels & Kazarian) and the Holy Demon Army (Toshiaki Kawada and Akira Taue).

What do all of these names have in common? They’re extensions of the personalities of the wrestlers that compose the teams, and as names, they help convince the audience that they’re good at what they do.

Then you have the opposite end of the spectrum. Just like with giving singles wrestlers bad ring names, sometimes promotions give tag teams awful names. WWE has been a prime example of this, having given atrocious names to many of its tag teams. Here, we’ll look at the five worst of the worst.


#5 The League of Nations

Two of these men were champions, but that didn’t stop Roman Reigns from crushing them without breaking a sweat.

Maybe I’m just biased about this one because I studied International Relations at university, but boy was this ever a dumb name for a team.

As a stable, the League of Nations (LoN) didn’t accomplish much of anything. In fact, its sole reason to exist was to help Roman Reigns get over with the audience, which failed miserably.

The reason for this failure was that the LoN wasn’t booked solidly from the beginning. No real explanation for their joining was ever given, and they weren’t booked to look strong against anyone. So how could it have been a big deal for Reigns to defeat them when they themselves didn’t amount to much of a challenge for him in the first place.

I get that WWE was going for a team of ‘international superstars’ to highlight the fact that they have wrestlers from all over the world. But naming them after the spineless precursor to the modern United Nations wasn’t the best way of doing that.

Unless, of course, they knew the original LoN was a failure and thus chose this name intentionally. If so, then WWE deserves at least some mild praise for making a great tongue-in-cheek joke about international relations.

#4 ‘Foxsana’

Combining their names into one meaningless word didn’t make me want to watch them more

We are now entering the area where WWE’s creative team is at its absolute laziest. For many years, there has been a trend in WWE to take two, thrown-together wrestlers, make them into a tag team, and make their team name a portmanteau of both of their names. This has been done many times, even if the resulting name doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.

‘Foxsana’ is a good example of this. Alicia Fox and Aksana were teaming together in relative obscurity, so they were given this random name by WWE’s management. It was just another attempt for WWE to try and repackage something we might not have seen before by giving it a new name. Unfortunately, this team didn’t stick, as Aksana left WWE in June 2014.

3 ‘Rybaxel’

These guys actually had a storyline reason to be teaming, but the creative team didn’t care.

Here we have another thrown-together tag team, this time being composed of former Paul Heyman Guys Ryback and Curtis Axel. These were two guys that had been aligned with one of the most influential people in wrestling history (and arguably WWE’s best speaker), yet somehow found themselves floating aimlessly in WWE’s mid-card.

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Here’s an idea: if their whole gimmick at the time was that they had been left behind by Heyman, why not work that into their tag team name? Was it necessary to be so lazy and combine their two names into a random word that, like ‘Foxsana’, does not make sense? How hard would it have been to say, ‘these are two ex-Heyman guys, and they’re mad about being dumped by their former manager’.

At least in that scenario, there’s a story and logical reason behind them teaming together. By calling them simply ‘RybAxel’, it makes them sound like just another thrown-together tag team about whom WWE’s creative department does not give a damn.

#2 The Shining Stars

What’s wrong with making them two wrestlers that happen to be Puerto Rican?

There might not be a single team in WWE that has been repackaged more times than Primo and Epico. For some strange reason, Vince McMahon and his Criminal Creative Committee think that if they take two guys and repackage them under a new gimmick, we, as fans, will treat this as something new and exciting. Too bad for them that the fans aren’t as stupid as they think, which is why every gimmick these two have tried to get over has failed spectacularly.

None of them was worse than the Shining Stars. This name, which also happened to be the name of their finisher (wow, that’s some excellent writing there, WWE), was not based on their own wrestling abilities or any personality traits they might’ve had (because neither one of them thought it was a good idea to say, ‘I’m such a good wrestler that I’m a shining star in the night’. At least that would’ve gotten them some attention.)

Instead, their team name was based on being from Puerto Rico, which they called ‘the Shining Star of the Caribbean’. So, basically, they were wrestling travel agents that sold timeshares to Puerto Rico.

Really makes you want to watch them, doesn’t it?

#1 ‘Air Boom’

Spectacularly epic naming fail!

There has never been a lazier, dumber, more uncreative name for a tag team than ‘Air Boom’. The name was a portmanteau of Evan ‘Air’ Bourne and Kofi Kingston’s ‘Boom’ taunt and signature ‘Boom drop’ manoeuvre.

The goal of this choice was for the fans to find a collective name for this duo, but apparently, they could not find a single name that fit both of them, so they combined two random words together in the hopes that it would stick.

WWE might as well have given Bourne and Kingston a big neon sign to carry that read, ‘we have nothing in common other than we’re athletic babyfaces’. It was lazy, unoriginal, and didn't do anything to convince people to watch Kingston and Bourne wrestle.

It was the epitome of laziness and serves as a shining example of how little effort WWE can and does put into mid-carders that aren’t already earmarked for future success.


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