Too Many Championships? Wrestling’s Inherent Problems with Title Belts

The constant complaint that AEW/WWE/NJPW/wrestling generally has too many championships is a half-truth. The solution, reducing the number of championships, isn’t inherently a magic bullet.

Mathematically or practically, fewer belts don’t equate to more prestige, better creative, and especially not financial profitability. Reducing championships alone would be treating the symptom rather than the wider illness.

Can too many championships water down the uniqueness of the belts collectively and individually? Yes. Can too many titles burden, restrict, and spread thin a booker’s creative capabilities? Yes. They can create subtraction by addition. The logic that less is more has plenty of benefits. Each championship gains additional attention, screen time, and allows for more creative potential.

Yet fundamentally, it doesn’t change or challenge the weaknesses or limitations of the booker and their creativity. Nor would fewer titles change the inherent historical framework that wrestling promotions inherently need and, at times, over-rely on. The issue isn’t the number of belts but how they are booked.

The problem can be reduced to how belts, their champions, challengers, their importance, and distinctions are presented. Often, belts, champions, challengers, and storylines can feel homogeneous. Belts lack individuality or a distinct sense of identity.

It’s a widespread and historic issue. One that, revisiting the old cliché, wrestling is cyclical, highlights how creative booms and busts can occur alongside, but not always correlate with, business success. Does that make fan frustration with the treatment and booking of championships inevitable? Is this the underlying illness, therefore a feature rather than a bug?

Bare Bones and Tropes

The structure of a champion’s run is inherently repetitive. In kayfabe, a new champion faces a string of challengers for their gold until they eventually lose their belt. Then the process starts again. Structure doesn’t compensate for story—characterization of champion and challenger, personal grudges, and motivations. There are plenty of tropes and cliches (and a box of gimmicks).

This structure doesn’t alter because it’s what inherently defines the genre. Not in AEW, WWE, or elsewhere. The issue with wrestling, like other media, whether TV or films, can be guilty of recycling the structure’s bare bones and simply repeating what’s worked before. Often tropes and cliches are thrown on like a mask of skin to disguise. What can lack is the emotional connective tissue that we invest in as fans.

Although there may be no new stories under the sun, wrestling, like all fiction, can reinterpret them to suit the age and audience. We’ve seen the rise of the anti-hero with Stone Cold Steve Austin. Reality with CM Punk, Roman Reigns, and Cody Rhodes finishing his story. We’ve seen Hangman Adam Page fight twice through modern masculinity and vulnerabilities to become champion.

The speed of adaptation and change isn’t quick for factors we’ll discuss shortly. A cycle seems inevitable. It takes time to build the next stories. Sometimes, the post-chase blues, where the follow-up stories lack the same cohesion and depth. Yet, this attention and creative thought predominantly go to one title, the top prize. If we’re lucky, prizes. They get the lion’s share of creative attention.

There are realities that, especially in fantasy booking and armchair criticizing, you never experience or plan for.

Demands of the Grind

Booking is difficult. Storylines are vulnerable and subject to change. Various factors, real-life and behind-the-scenes, cause plans to change. That’s excluding the capabilities and limitations of the wrestlers (champions/challengers) involved. Many variables cause a failure in execution.

Some bookers and wrestlers often rely on the bare bones of a structure because that can be safe and convenient. Hierarchically, midcard titles receive less creative attention. Plenty of bookers rely on tropes that are embedded in their creative process, which isn’t just restricted to the championship picture. We see a repetition of the same tropes and cliches by rote.

For the biggest promotions, AEW and WWE need to fill at least a minimum of 4 and 7 hours per week. That excludes PPVs/PLEs and specials. This demands a lot of attention, energy, and creativity, 52 weeks a year without breaks. Championships, as the bare bones of a story, provide a shortcut and crutches, given the huge creative restrictions.

More championships provide both opportunities for wrestlers on large rosters and to be active in storylines, in theory. In practice, we can see neglect and bare minimal storytelling persist, or inconsistent, underwhelming stories.

Promotions rely on what works. AEW can depend on being “where the best wrestle” to compensate for a lack of storyline depth, which ironically, because of AEW’s philosophical framework, self-exposes their shortcomings. WWE can rely on Capital M moments, push style over substance, to paper over its narrative cracks.

Consistently strong creativity and uniqueness are unsustainable in a climate that isn’t changing any time soon. Having fewer championships would mean less creative strain, but what remains are issues with roster size/rotation, the grind, and time restraints.

Removing the crutches doesn’t mean the patient can walk unaided. Not without the right rehab.

Maintaining an Identity

Championships experience two eternal issues. First, championships require distinct identities that separate them from other titles.

When we think about historic midcard championships, some of the most notable are synonymous with specific ideas or concepts. WCW’s Cruiserweight Championship is remembered for its dynamic and innovative matches, which introduced some fans to global styles. It opposed the slower-paced and melodrama-driven main event scene. TNA’s X-Division Championship took this further with its emphasis on no limits. WWE’s Intercontinental Championship is one of the most beloved because it’s seen as a platform for wrestling’s future stars and workhorses.

Some championships have strong associations with stipulations or gimmicks. WWE Hardcore Championship with its 24/7 rule. AEW’s TNT Championship, initially and frequently, with open challenges.

Although these unique elements are not always enough. Nostalgia and history streamline those various factors that are inside and outside the booking’s control, leading to periods of failure or ceilings. WCW’s Cruiserweight division wrestlers were characterized as “vanilla midgets”. Politics, by their heavyweight counterparts, kept many wrestlers in a holding pattern.

The mythology surrounding the Intercontinental Championship was created by fans and made a reality by fans-turned-wrestlers. Dominik Mysterio, like The Honky Tonk Man, The Ultimate Warrior, Val Venis, and more, was a strong character worker rather than a workhorse. Differently, sometimes a buck in trends can help a renewal in interest.