The Most Legendary Pro Wrestling Tag Team Feuds Of All Time

Despite not being at the forefront of the major American wrestling companies today, tag team wrestling is one of those things that when it's done right, it's very hard to top it.

Take one of your favorite singles feuds. You pit two men or women against each other to see who is better, often with a high amount of stakes on the line, with weeks and months of backstory to make you care about the eventual showdown even more. Now imagine that, but doubled. Two extra bodies to tell even more stories, add even more stakes, and potentially double the amount of moments that can be made. To put it simply, tag team wrestling is insanely entertaining and it's a crime that some of the major companies in the world treat it as an afterthought.

What makes it even more of a crime is that some of the most entertaining rivalries in wrestling history have either been between two tag teams, or have even splintered off from a tag team breaking up. After all, you wouldn't have a feud like Kevin Owens vs. Sami Zayn if they hadn't been a tag team first. Tag team wrestling is embedded into the DNA of professional wrestling, to the point where companies like CMLL and New Japan Pro Wrestling still use tag team bouts to build to their big singles encounters without having to say a single word, they just do it within the confines of a tag team contest. 

That's what we're here to talk about today. So find the nearest person to you so that you can both sit back, relax, and join us on a journey through the history books, where we will travel to different companies and decades to find some of the most iconic and memorable tag team feuds in wrestling history.

The original tag team rivalry that has either directly or subtlety influenced virtually every long-term tag team story in American wrestling history. On one side, you had The Midnight Express, managed by none other than the "Louisville Slugger" himself Jim Cornette, the duo of Bobby Eaton and Dennis Condrey were no-nonsense heels who let Cornette do all of the talking for them, while pummelling their opponents in between the ropes. On the other side, you had The Rock N Roll Express, the team Robert Gibson and Ricky Morton who were babyfaces that were so easy to cheer for that Morton is often cited as the man who popularized the "babyface in peril" spot, helping Gibson popularize the "hot tag" in the process.

The juxtaposition of the flashy babyfaces and the brutish heels made this rivalry special to begin with, but it also helped that it came around at a time when professional wrestling was entering one of its first big boom periods. Wrestling on television was gaining more traction, ratings were flying up week by week, and while the NWA could always rely on the big singles stars of the day like Ric Flair and Dusty Rhodes to get people interested, those fans would often stick around once they saw what the tag team division had to offer.

Both teams would feud over the Mid-South Tag Team Championships in 1984 and 1985, with both teams trading the titles back and forth in various stipulation matches to make sure that Cornette couldn't get himself involved. They had steel cage matches, scaffold matches, and Cornette was even placed in a straight jacket to ensure a clean and fair contest, but these methods wouldn't always prove to work out too well. What did work out was all four men were showered with praise for their work in Mid-South, and that praise was only amplified by the time they started feuding over the NWA Tag Team Championships.

In Jim Crockett Promotions, it was actually Morton and Gibson who got the better of Condrey and Eaton in the long-term, winning four sets of titles compared to the Midnight Express' solitary win during the feud, but their matches made all four men championship worthy. In particular, their run of two-out-of-three falls matches from 1986 are now seen as the blueprint for how a two-out-of-three falls match should go.

The feud would be altered slightly in 1987 when Condrey left the NWA without any notice, and Stan Lane was drafted in to take his place as the new member of the Midnight Express, but that didn't stop the feud from being any less special. After three years of being the best tag team rivalry in the country, the two teams finally settled the score at Starrcade 1987 in a scaffold match, with Morton and Gibson getting the win. The two teams would meet later on in life, but their feud in the 1980s is the stuff of legends.

We can't do a list on the most legendary tag team rivalries of all time without talking about The Briscoes. Their motto of "Top Five, Dead or Alive" was very close to the truth for many fans of theirs as they established themselves as one of the world's greatest duos from an early age. They won championships in every virtually company they worked for, whether that be ROH, GCW, CZW, or Impact (TNA) Wrestling in the United States, or even overseas in places like New Japan Pro Wrestling or Pro Wrestling NOAH. They had legendary feuds with the likes of The Young Bucks, The Motor City Machine Guns, and a rivalry with Kevin Steen and El Generico that was so good that is was dangerously close to getting on this list.

With all that said, their final feud as a tag team before the untimely passing of Jay Briscoe in January 2023 has to get a mention. Due to controversial comments made by Jay in the past, The Briscoes were never allowed to appear on AEW TV at the request of Warner Media, and they never got to work for WWE due to the comments, as well as not being aesthetically pleasing enough for their product. However, when AEW President Tony Khan bought Ring of Honor in 2022, he wasted no time in platforming The Briscoes as the main attraction, and pitted them against the one team everyone wanted to see them wrestle, FTR.

FTR and The Briscoes came face-to-face for the first time at ROH Final Battle 2021, the last ROH event before Khan purchased the company, and teased an eventual match that would take place at Supercard of Honor in March 2022 for the ROH Tag Team Championships. When that match happened, it singlehandedly changed the perception of FTR in the eyes of the fans, effectively turning them babyface due to how good the match was, and showed the entire world what they had been missing out on when it came to Jay and Mark Briscoe. In the weeks and months that followed, their story would be limited to social media due to ROH having no TV deal and The Briscoes being banned from AEW, but that didn't stop the anticipation for the second bout.

At Death Before Dishonor in July 2022, FTR defeated The Briscoes for a second time, this time in a two-out-of-three falls match that some would argue is better than the first, and FTR were on top of the world as they already held gold in both NJPW and AAA. However, when they failed to capture AEW gold in December, The Briscoes saw their chance and challenged them to a Double Dog Collar match for Final Battle. What followed is considered by many to be the greatest tag team match of the modern era, and with The Briscoes getting their hands raised, the perfect way to conclude arguably the best tag team trilogy ever, and the career of Jay Briscoe.

What started off as a good friendship in World Class Championship Wrestling turned into one of the greatest feuds of all time, and while it isn't technically a straight two-on-two rivalry like every other entry on this list, The Fabulous Freebirds vs. The Von Erichs is simply too important to ignore.

Those who tuned in to see WCCW's offering on Christmas Day in 1982 were hoping that Kerry Von Erich could gift everyone in Texas a ceremonial Christmas present by dethroning Ric Flair for the NWA Worlds Heavyweight Championship inside a steel cage. To make sure that there was a third man in the cage that handle what chaos could unfold, Michael Hayes of The Freebirds was voted as the special guest referee, while Terry Gordy occupied the ringside area. David Von Erich had helped The Freebirds win the WCCW World Six Man Tag Team Championships earlier that night, so the deck was firmly stacked against "The Nature Boy."

However, Hayes was being a little too biased towards Kerry, something he didn't appreciate, and when Flair managed to shove Kerry into Hayes, the fuse was lit. Hayes thought the attack was intentional, and after Gordy slammed the cage door on Kerry's head, Flair left Texas with the title in hand, and the greatest rivalry in WCCW history was born. 

Throughout all of 1983, the feud between The Fabulous Freebirds and The Von Erichs was the most exciting feud in all of wrestling. This was before the likes of WrestleMania and Starrcade became marquee events, meaning that any show that had a combination of the two groups taking on each other would be a sell out, and WCCW was genuinely making progress towards being the best NWA territory in the country. What sold people on the feud was the dynamic between the two groups as you had The Von Erich brothers who would fight for "Texas Pride," and being the hometown boys at virtually every show made them the biggest babyfaces in the country. Whereas The Freebirds were from Georgia, acted like thugs at every opportunity, and as Kevin Von Erich once put it, the feud was "a battle between decency and filth."

Singles, tag team, and six man tag team gold would come and go throughout the feud, and it seemed like there was absolutely no signs of slowing this feud down, that was until tragedy struck. In February 1984, David Von Erich passed away while on tour in Japan. The news sent shockwaves through the wrestling world as David was earmarked as the man to dethrone Ric Flair for the NWA Worlds Heavyweight Championship, but sadly that never came to be. The feud between The Fabulous Freebirds and The Von Erichs would continue after David's death, but was never the same and fizzled out by the end of the year. It would be revived in 1988, but nothing would ever get close to the magic the two groups made earlier that decade.

By mid-2010, TNA Wrestling had almost torpedoed any and all good will they had from the previous years for a variety of reasons. Hulk Hogan and Eric Bischoff came in to the company and made sweeping changes like hiring all of their old friends who couldn't work properly, getting rid of the six sided ring, and moving "TNA Impact" to Monday nights for a brief period as if it was 1996 all over again. In a lot of ways, TNA in 2010 was very similar to WCW in that a lot of what made the company genuinely exciting and an actual alternative to WWE at that time was the strength of their midcard.

The company had always had the X-Division, and the Knockouts division was always a step above the WWE Divas at the time, but TNA could argue that they also had the one of the best tag team divisions in the entire world and no one could tell them otherwise. At the forefront of the division by mid-2010 was Beer Money Inc., Robert Roode and James Storm who had previous tag team experience in Team Canada and America's Most Wanted respectively, and The Motor City Machine Guns, Chris Sabin and Alex Shelley who brought the X-Division excitement to the tag team format.

Both teams had crossed paths previously and showed great chemistry, leading many fans to wonder if TNA would ever stop trying to put their top titles on guys who had their prime 15 years earlier and give these two teams a chance, and thanks to Scott Hall they did. Hall would get himself arrested in May 2010, causing TNA to strip him, Kevin Nash, and Eric Young of the TNA Tag Team Championships. Beer Money would win a mini tournament to fill one spot in the match to determine the new champions, while the Guns already had a title shot in their back pockets, and at TNA's Victory Road pay-per-view on July 11, 2010, one of the best tag team rivalries of the modern era truly started.

Sabin and Shelley picked up the win at Victory Road, making them the new champions in the process, and the match was so well received that TNA thought the best thing to do would be to run it back five more times over the next five weeks. A best-of-five series was set up for the next five episodes of "Impact," with the winners walking away with the gold. Beer Money won a ladder match and street fight back-to-back, with the Guns levelling things in a steel cage and in an Ultimate X match. The decider was a two-out-of-three falls match, with Sabin and Shelley retaining their titles in what many consider to be one of the best matches in TNA history. They would hold on to the titles for six months, before Beer Money came back for revenge and won the titles from the Guns at the start of 2011.

When you saw the title of this article, this is probably the feud you immediately thought of. It's a feud that is still talked about and celebrated to this day, so much so that Edge and Christian have recently reunited in AEW, and The Hardy Boyz are preparing for one final match against The Dudley Boyz at TNA's Bound For Glory pay-per-view on October 12. Had it not been for this feud, it's very possible that all three teams might not have had the longevity they have enjoyed for the past 25 years.

Beginning at the end of the 1990s, Edge, Christian, and The Hardys proved that the WWE tag team division was going to be in good hands with their series of matches in the Terri Runnels Invitational Tournament, culminating in their iconic ladder match at No Mercy 1999. A few months later, The Dudley Boyz threw their tables into the mix after a very successful run in ECW, taking the rivalry to a whole new level. The Royal Rumble pay-per-view in 2000 saw the first-ever tag team tables match between The Hardys and The Dudleys, a match that saw a sold out Madison Square Garden crowd give all four men a standing ovation at the end of it, but after Bubba Ray and D-Von captured the WWE Tag Team Championships a month later, these six men would be linked forever.

Between WrestleMania 16 and 17, it was almost impossible to wrestle the WWE Tag Team Championships away from Edge and Christian, The Dudley Boyz, or The Hardy Boyz, and it's not like WWE wanted to take the titles away from any of them given the magic they were making together. Triangle ladder matches, steel cage matches, elimination tables matches, fireworks were made with every stipulation that was attached to any match involving the six men, to the point where they were given the chance to make their own stipulation famous; Tables, Ladders, and Chairs, OH MY!

The TLC match is still a fixture of WWE today, and between 2009 and 2020, the stipulation even had its own pay-per-view named after it. That wouldn't be possible if it weren't for the efforts of the three most famous teams of the WWE's Attitude Era. The original match at SummerSlam 2000 was a car crash spectacle unlike anything anyone had ever seen, and is still considered one of the greatest matches in the history of SummerSlam. The same can be said for the sequel at WrestleMania 17, which is up there with Mankind and The Undertaker's Hell in a Cell match as one of the most famous matches of all time, and even the forgotten TLC match from "WWE SmackDown" in May 2001 is fondly remembered by many long-time WWE fans.

It's perhaps the most famous tag team feud of all time, and everyone involved has reached legendary status for what they did to themselves, and each other, throughout it.