When Tony Khan recently introduced the confusing new National Championship to AEW, plenty of fans criticized the promotion for already having too many belts and now making the problem worse.
During a call with the media today ahead of Saturday’s AEW Full Gear 2025 pay-per-view, Khan was asked to explain his thought process on having “so many titles” in AEW and ROH.
Tony’s uninterrupted answer went on for nearly six minutes. Here is his explanation, and keep in mind that I tried to cut out at least
one minute of his response that was mostly just recapping some of the ROH’s current storylines or angles.
“There’s a lot of good things in that question…
I think it’s important to look at the content that any wrestling promotion is producing, and what the model for the business of that company is. And for AEW, the revenue is primarily driven from TV and pay-per-view. And we produce many hours of TV and pay-per-view. We also produce a lot of live events, and we produce over 100 shows per year, and several hours per week.
This is different than the beginning of AEW, because at the beginning of AEW, we only had two hours of television, and I had no association whatsoever with Ring of Honor, and certainly was not the owner and promoter of that company.
…With ROH, I did inherit their championships, and I’ve expanded the women’s championships in ROH. And AEW, the company has changed, and we’ve added Collision, which is a hugely important part of the AEW weekly TV. The lifeblood of the company is the AEW / Warner Bros. partnership, of which Collision is a huge part, and we’re a company now that produces twice as many hours of TV, and twice as many pay-per-views as we did when we started. And we’re also a much more successful company, with TV rights that are many, many, many, times higher than at the beginning of the promotion, and still several times higher than what they were even as recently as last year.
So I absolutely think that it’s important to look at the ecosystem of a wrestling company, and…for AEW, coming through the pandemic, the model we had where everything was Dynamite focused, week in, week out. And it still is very focused on Dynamite, but also I’m very focused on Collision. And there is a lot more to cover.
There are events I care a lot about that did not exist at the beginning of AEW. I care a lot about WrestleDream, and Forbidden Door, and Dynasty. These are shows that mean a lot to me. Worlds End, I care a lot about, and that was not a thing at the beginning of AEW. So, I do think as we’ve expanded and grown, and looking at the base we had, which was Dynamite [and 4 pay-per-views], and most importantly did not include All In, which is by far the most successful event we’ve added…now AEW All In is the biggest show in AEW by far, and it didn’t exist at the beginning. So the company is very different than it was at the beginning. Our three biggest gates, and our three biggest attendances ever, are for All In, which is an event that we didn’t have at the start of AEW. And then Forbidden Door would be the other in the top four, and probably, I would imagine, the top five gates in AEW history.
And then when you add in how big some of the Grand Slams, which again, we hadn’t started doing Grand Slams at the beginning. So we’ve really expanded, and grown, and built this thing a lot. That’s where some of the changes and evolutions come, and I’m very, very proud of what we’re putting out this year. I think we’re also very well-positioned for the future in pro wrestling. I really believe that. And I think we’ll be in very good shape coming out of Full Gear, and coming out of this year, going into next year.
Thanks for asking.”
To summarize Khan’s incredibly long response, AEW now produces a lot more content than it did when the promotion launched, thanks to an expanded PPV schedule and the addition of Collision (what about the subtraction of Rampage?). The implication is that more belts are needed to make all these extra shows feel special, but he doesn’t directly say anything about AEW championship belts despite talking for nearly six minutes. Also, did you know that All In has the biggest gates and attendances in AEW history?
So there you have it, Cagesiders. Do you now have a much better understanding of why AEW and ROH have so many damn titles?
