10 Worst Title Reigns In AEW History

"Growing pains" has been the phrase most commonly associated with the changes All Elite Wrestling has undergone in the last few years, and that's reasonable to an extent - the quest for money and expansion has resulted in one happening as a result of the other. 

Television rights for Rampage and Collision have made AEW a several-hours-a-week television product with 10-12 pay-per-view offerings as opposed to 2019's starting point of Dynamite on TNT and a quarterly high-stakes supershow. In that respect, a comparison between the two products is somewhat unfair, but it happens anyway because, amongst other things, people miss the quality of the original. 

The limited scope might have been bad for business, but the rules and restrictions put in place by the smaller roster and fewer belts kept the product honest and disciplined in impossible ways the more wrestlers and belts you add. It's why there's not much in here from the earliest days of the organisation when it couldn't have aimed to be more different from the increasingly monolithic WWE. That's not to say mistakes weren't made, but the attempts to maintain the prestige of the wrestlers and the belts were obvious enough that some leeway could be extended.

That's less the case now, as evidenced by several very recent titleholders...

More on the other belt that was severely damaged by everything that happened on the night of All Out 2022, but AEW's brand new Trios Championships being won then immediately vacated did little help a division that already felt like it was being formally launched a year or two late.

The Elite were great winners of a great tournament, and would prove that again in a captivating best-of-seven series with Death Triangle when they returned to television from their suspension, but the belts being drenched in controversy from the off left a stain that hasn't really been washed away during the coldest period in AEW history. 

Trios matches required their constant presence and attention to sell the idea that this was where the best wrestled, long before the company forced it through as a catchphrase. They'd been pulled into the whirlwind of chaos stirred up by CM Punk's words in the All Out 2022 press scrum, the belts came with them, and it understandably felt like forever before the performers and the prizes were back to best.