WWE NXT is widely seen as the company’s most entertaining product, and it’s been built up into a revered brand through years of hard-work and out-of-this-world TakeOver specials. Let’s take a look at the top ten rivalries in NXT history, all of which have played a key role in helping the brand earn so much respect from wrestling fans.
From Sasha Banks vs. Bayley to Tommaso Ciampa vs. Johnny Gargano, WWE NXT has given wrestling fans some of the most heart-warming, heart-breaking, and oh-my-God-did-you-see-that rivalries of the past ten years. There’s a reason why this brand has been responsible for four five-star matches already in 2018, whereas WWE’s last five-star match from the Wrestling Observer News’s Dave Meltzer came in 2011.
In this list of the ten greatest feuds in NXT history, I tried to keep a mix of women’s wrestling and tag team wrestling, in addition to balancing out recent and past feuds. I wish I had more women’s rivalries on this list, but when NXT had the four Horsewomen, the rivalries were more diffuse and complex, which makes them far less conducive to being ranked on a simple list.
So far that reason, I’d like to give Charlotte Flair, Paige, Emma, Natalya, Summer Rae, and Becky Lynch special thanks for their work in the early eras of women’s wrestling in NXT, because they set the groundwork for two of the top-three rivalries in WWE NXT history despite not making the list themselves (you’ll see which ones I’m taking about shortly).
I’d also like to make one statement before beginning. I purposefully snubbed Kevin Owens vs. Sami Zayn, because I believe their feud is about more than what happened in NXT. I didn’t think it’d be fair to rank them here. I also omitted Zayn vs. Cesaro, opting to rank a different Zayn rivalry (with a more emotional story) highly.