Antonio Cesaro: Why WWE's Newest European Star Is Ready to Break out

This year’s SummerSlam yielded a handful of memorable moments: Brock Lesnar giving Triple H the fight of his life, Chris Jericho winning the “big one” in a stellar opening match and CM Punk extending his epic reign as WWE Champion.

For those of you that tuned in to the free pre-show, Antonio Cesaro defeating Santino Marella to become the new WWE United States Champion was among SummerSlam’s memorable moments. If you missed it, go out of your way to watch it because this young European grappler is clearly ready to breakout.

Cesaro and Santino had, arguably, the best match in the brief history of the giveaway pre-show matches. While the match didn’t grace the main stage of SummerSlam, Cesaro continued to take advantage of every opportunity given to him.

In his short time as a WWE Superstar, Cesaro has managed to accumulate a good amount of heat. Since Santino is a very popular baby face, it’s only natural that Cesaro would get a lot of heat for winning the United States Championship from him.

Ideally, Cesaro’s clean win over Santino means that he will move on soon. To continue his rise, the “Swiss Sensation” should move on to a program with Christian.

It wasn’t that long ago that Christian handed Cesaro his first singles loss in the WWE. Like Santino, Christian is very over as a baby face. Furthermore, Christian is a veteran wrestler and is definitely capable of having top-notch matches with Cesaro.

To allow Cesaro to truly break out, he is in need of more than just a series of matches with someone like Christian. He needs a legitimate, well developed story.

In an interview with Arda Ocal, Cesaro teased the possibility of turning the United States Championship into the European Championship.

Even if that doesn’t happen, they still have a compelling story that can be developed between him and Christian. Cesaro has deemed himself the champion of Americans. Other than his singles victory over the champion, the Canadian native Christian can challenge Cesaro by saying that he doesn’t fall under his reign over Americans.

Before defeating Santino for the title, Cesaro owned two pinfall victories over him on back-to-back editions of Smackdown. In addition to having popular baby faces chase him for the championship, Cesaro should continue to be a dominant heel.

That said, the WWE will have to avoid the temptation of using his pairing with Aksana to award Cesaro with cheap victories. His dominant booking has worked wonderfully for him thus far, and I don’t see that changing.

With five hours of television between Raw and Smackdown, there’s no reason that Cesaro shouldn’t be featured every week. If the WWE will fully get behind Cesaro, there is no doubt he can become this year’s breakout star.

Michael Prunka is a Bleacher Report Featured Columnist. To stay up to date with his WWE and NHL commentary, you can like his Facebook page, follow him on Twitter and follow him on Tout.