The New Day is officially WWE’s top tag team of all time

For the last few years, fans have recognized the New Day for their excellence as a tag team despite WWE’s clear lack of interest in presenting their tag team division as a viable money-drawing attraction.

As teams have come, gone, and gotten split up, the trio of Kofi Kingston, Xavier Woods, and Big E has remained the constant and the barometer for which other main roster teams are compared to. Even the most ardent supporter couldn’t have envisioned that when this team originally formed, but these three made sure that this didn’t fail, and their ranking among WWE’s tag teams has reaffirmed that.

Out of 50 WWE tag teams, The New Day ranked number one.

As part of a series that aired on Peacock, WWE compiled a list of the 50 greatest tag teams in the company’s history. The countdown to number one featured a number of outstanding tandems, teams such as The World’s Greatest Tag Team (Shelton Benjamin and Charlie Haas), Los Guerreros, The Usos, The Legion of Doom, The Hardy Boyz, The Dudley Boyz, and Edge & Christian.

Out of all of those great teams, however, WWE ranked New Day in the top spot.

Now, lists such as these primarily exist to spark debates; one’s feelings on the rankings often come down to each individual’s interpretation of the criteria for the list. Elements such as era and how much of a fan someone is of a person/team play a part in it as well. It’s all subjective, as they say.

That said, it’s hard to look at what New Day has done since linking up in 2014 and come away disappointed with them being ranked number one on this list. The accolades speak for themselves: 11-time WWE/Raw/SmackDown Tag Team Champions, WWE’s Men’s Tag Team of the Year in 2019, PWI’s Tag Team of the Year in 2015 and 2016, and the eighth spot in PWI’s 50 best tag teams of 2020 list (The Golden Role Models [Bayley and Sasha Banks] and The Street Profits were the only WWE teams to rank higher than them on that list).

It’s also important to note that, unlike a lot of other teams on this list, New Day accomplished this while not taking part in the tag team boom periods of the 80s and the early 2000s (to be fair, they weren’t working opposite teams like The Heart Throbs or The New Midnight Express, either).

In an era where WWE puts their tag teams in seasonal/holiday-themed street fights before breaking them up in hopes of getting two singles stars for the price of one (a tactic WWE even tried to pull on New Day, though rumors suggest that they may reverse course this fall), New Day has ensured that the tag titles maintained a level of credibility that the company doesn’t seem invested in upkeeping (look at how the current SmackDown Tag Team Champions have been booked for the last few weeks if you need some fresh evidence for this claim).

The work that Kingston, Woods, and Big E have put in to make this team what it is today is also what makes this so fulfilling. Most fans who are honest observers of the product are well aware of the issues WWE has had (and still has) with portraying Black wrestlers on their shows and early on, it looked like New Day would become another part of that unfortunate history, either in their original gimmick that WWE would’ve stripped of any nuance or as the overly-positive, singing and dancing babyface preachers.

But New Day realized what they were doing wasn’t working and made it into something that was their own — while subverting a number of those stereotypes — (a rarity in today’s WWE) and became one of the company’s most beloved acts.

It’s that adulation that helped propel Kingston to a lengthy WWE Championship reign. It’s that support that will likely push Big E to become one of the top singles babyfaces in the promotion.

That popularity combined with them raising the floor of a division that WWE enjoys taking a sledgehammer to is what makes them such an outstanding team, and it’s great that the company recognized their efforts via this list.