MJF Debuts New AEW World Championship Design

By Connor Casey

MJF made his first appearance as AEW World Champion on this week's AEW Dynamite and debuted a brand new design for the company's top prize. After explaining how he wound up joining forces with William Regal and how he holds no ill will toward The Firm, he explained that he can't stand the current version of the AEW World Championship — mostly because it reminds him of every man who previously held it. 

He and Regal then debuted the new title, dubbed "The Big Burberry Belt" or "Triple B." The title looks identical to the previous design, but it has a new brown leather strap with the same Burberry pattern as MJF's scarf. After running down his potential opponents, he openly discussed "The Bidding War of 2024" and that he'll rarely ever wrestle as the new champ. He closed out the promo by knocking out Regal with a sucker punch, then mocking the same email Regal sent him when he tried to join WWE years ago. Bryan Danielson ran out to check on Regal, but by that point, Max was already gone. Regal had to be stretchered out of the ring, still unconscious from the attack.

Cody Rhodes, one of the founding members of AEW, talked with ComicBook back in 2019 about what inspired AEW's world title design. The title is modeled after the the Mid-South North American Heavyweight Championship. 

"The founder of AEW, Tony Khan, is a lifelong wrestling fan," Rhodes said. "You can ask him about any talent, the most obscure, and he can tell you where they had their run, how many stars were in this match. It's really crazy but him and I had watched the Mid-South the North American Title was so large. Bill Watts was wearing it and it was so large. We thought, we really want this big, big belt. Then we went to The Ace of Belts, Dave Millican, he knew exactly what we were going for. We went through some edits back and forth with the other EVPs. We were so happy with how it turned out.

"It's probably about five pounds heavier than the IWGP World Heavyweight Championship. That's the heaviest belt I had ever seen. It's really a solid chunk of change. The person who's got to put that in their carry-on bag is going to have some fun at TSA but it's inspired a lot by the Mid-South and the larger titles in our industry," he added. 

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