I know that I’m pretty critical of a lot of the things that AEW does, but I’ll be the first to admit that I kind of like the Continental Classic tournament they’ve been doing on an annual basis. You have a lot of main event talent, intermixed with some talented guys from the mid card, and you have them wrestling in a bunch of matches that don’t really have any storyline behind them, and most importantly, have results that aren’t just the main eventers running roughshod over the mid card guys.
Speedball Mike Bailey picked up an impressive win over Kyle Fletcher, Jungle Boy Jack Perry got a win against Pac, and the most shocking outcome was when Kevin Knight picked up a clean win against Kazuchika Okada. They really did a good job of selling that anyone could beat anyone, regardless of their standing in the company, and it led to a lot of pretty pure wrestling.
However, it wasn’t until the tournament concluded did I realize that there was an actual prize at the end of the whole thing; in previous years, AEW had a, surprise, title blet for the winner of the Continental Classic, which was the [don’t call me Intercontinental] Continental championship, which was originally won by of all people, Eddie Kingston. He would then lose it to Okada, who would successfully defend the title by winning the 2025 Continental Classic, and continue to hold the title until it was merged in July 2025 with the International Championship in a completely nerfed version of Okada vs. Omega.
But for all intents and purposes, the Continental championship was deactivated, along with the International championship, and Okada began carting around a, surprise, new blet, christened the AEW Unified Championship, which they tried like hell to sell it as a World title equivalent, since Okada is very much a World title caliber performer, but unsurprisingly, it didn’t catch.
Getting back to the present, without any real explanation, going into the conclusion of the 2026 Continental Classic, the Unified Championship was already scrapped, and it was decided that the winner of the tournament would become the new Continental champion. Conveniently, Okada would also advance to the finals, hoping to defend the title in the finals regardless of the fact that the title is up for grabs at any other point in the year, storylines notwithstanding.
Spoiler-alert, Jon Moxley won the tournament by defeating Kazuchika Okada, thus becoming the new Continental champion.
However, conveniently, Okada would still have a blet to cart around, because when they scrapped the Unified Championship after six historic months, they reactivated the International Championship, which was by default, Kazuchika Okada.
It should also be pointed out that when the Continental and International were merged into the Unified, it took one blet off the table, but AEW responded quickly by creating a, surprise, new blet, in the AEW National Championship, which was won by, and is currently held by Ricochet (which I’m actually okay with).
But for a promotion that has taken a lot of flack for its Oprah-like EVERYONE GETS A BLET number of titles, it’s just hilarious that they tried to pare down, couldn’t, and when they retconned one of their attempts to pare down, ultimately they end up with more blets in which they started with. So to recap, AEW currently has:
- AEW World Championship
- AEW Women’s Championship
- AEW Tag Team Championship
- AEW Women’s Tag Team Championship
- AEW TNT Championship
- AEW TBS Championship
- AEW Trios Championship
- AEW Continental Championship
- AEW International Championship
- AEW National Championship
For those keeping count, that’s a total of 14 physical blets with the AEW name on them. This doesn’t account for the revolving door of Ring of Honor, CMLL, RevPro, or any of the backyard promotions’ blets that Mercedes Moné is carting around. Like, there have been literal shows where every single segment has had someone walking around carrying a blet.
There’s clearly no such thing as permanence in AEW. Titles get merged, deactivated, retconned and then reactivated at a moment’s notice, without any genuine or logical explanations. This isn’t even the first time that this has happened too, because it maybe hasn’t even been an entire calendar year since AEW merged their Trios with the ROH Six-Man titles, which resulted in at one point the Bang Bang Gang of Jay White, Austin and Colton Gunn carrying nine straps collectively, but then a few months later, Ring of Honor decided to just break off and crown new Six-Man champions without any real explanation.
Either way, the point remains, AEW still operates in head-scratching manners on the regular, and as much as I want to like them more than I do, I’m more often too busy scratching my head trying to piece together all of their weird operational decisions to figure out what the fuck is going on.
