The NEVER Openweight 6-Man Tag Team Championship is a professional wrestling championship owned by the New Japan Pro-Wrestlingpromotion. The title was announced on December 21, 2015, with the first champions crowned on January 4, 2016. Through NJPW's relationship with Ring of Honor, the title has also been defended in the American promotion. The championship is contested for by teams of three wrestlers and is the first title of its kind in the history of NJPW. The title's openweight nature means that both heavyweight and junior heavyweight wrestlers are eligible to challenge for it. Like most professional wrestling championships, the title is won as a result of a match with a predetermined outcome. There have been fifteen reigns shared among eleven teams and twenty-four wrestlers. The title is currently vacated.
History
On December 11, 2015, NJPW announced that at Wrestle Kingdom 10 in Tokyo Dome on January 4, 2016, the Bullet Club trio of Bad Luck Fale, Tama Tonga and Yujiro Takahashi would take on Toru Yano and two mystery partners. Eight days later, Yano revealed his partners as the Ring of Honor tag teamThe Briscoe Brothers. On December 21, NJPW added that the match would now be contested for the newly created NEVER Openweight 6-Man Tag Team Championship, the first six-man title in the promotion's history. The title's name carried the acronym NEVER, which stood for "New Blood", "Evolution", "Valiantly", "Eternal", and "Radical" and was a NJPW-promoted series of events that ran from 2010 to 2012 and featured younger up-and-coming talent and outside wrestlers not signed to the promotion. This would mark the second title to carry the NEVER name, after the NEVER Openweight Championship, which was introduced in November 2012. and Ricochet upon winning the title in September 2016 On January 4, 2016, Toru Yano and The Briscoe Brothers defeated Bad Luck Fale, Tama Tonga and Yujiro Takahashi to become the inaugural champions. After losing the title to Fale, Tonga and Takahashi on February 11 at The New Beginning in Osaka, Yano and The Briscoe Brothers also became the first two-time winners of the title, when they regained it three days later at The New Beginning in Niigata. Later that month, the title was defended outside Japan for the first time, when new champions Kenny Omega and The Young Bucks successfully defended it against ACH, Kushida and Matt Sydal at ROH's 14th Anniversary Show in Las Vegas, Nevada. On September 25, 2016, the title was vacated for the first time due to one of the champions, Matt Sydal, failing to make it to a scheduled championship defense because of "travel issues". NJPW crowned new champions that same day. On January 4, 2017, at Wrestle Kingdom 11 in Tokyo Dome, the Los Ingobernables de Japon trio of Bushi, Evil and Sanada won a four-team gauntlet match to capture the title for the first time. They then began exchanging the title with members of the Taguchi Japanstable, resulting in them becoming record three-time champions on May 3 at Wrestling Dontaku 2017. The quick title changes resulted in the title earning a reputation as a "hot potato", with Japanese media nicknaming it the "short life championship". During its first 20 months of existence, the title changed hands 12 times with no championship team successfully defending it more than two times until L.I.J.'s record-breaking third title reign. The title was also slotted on the undercards of NJPW events with some championship matches taking place as early as the second match on a seven-match show with no other title matches. Bushi publicly criticized NJPW's handling of the title, claiming that the booking was costing the title credibility. L.I.J.'s record-setting reign ended on December 17, 2017, when they were defeated by Bullet Club's Bad Luck Fale, Tama Tonga and Tanga Loa in their fourth defense.
Reigns
There have been twenty reigns shared among twenty-eight wrestlers and fifteen teams with one vacancy. Chaos were the first champions in the title's history. Ryusuke Taguchi, Togi Makabe, and Toru Yano hold the record for the longest reign, while Los Ingobernables de Japon hold the record for the shortest reign in the title's history, with their first reign of one day being the shortest. They also hold the record for most reigns as a team with three. Individually, Bushi, Evil and Sanada share the record with Hiroshi Tanahashi, Ricochet and Toru Yano.
