Retired Championship Designs We’re Glad Are Gone

The beauty and grandeur of a pro wrestling championship are as crucial to the belt’s success and longevity as the booking of the person holding it. The AEW World Championship, for instance, is a grandiose title, reeking of elegance, and its importance has been well-kept by the careful booking dedicated to its titleholders – until Jon Moxley’s latest reign, that is.

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Every Current WWE Main Roster Championship, Ranked By Design

Currently, WWE has 13 active championships on the main roster. But what is the very best belt design on WWE’s main roster right now?

Sometimes, though, a championship belt is so repugnantly hideous that no gracious penmanship can save its legacy. From top prizes in sports entertainment to lesser mid-card championships to those belts self-created by its champions, these championship designs have, thankfully, been retired.

Spinner WWE United States Championship

It Was Far Worse Than The WWE Championship’s Spinner Design

The spinner WWE Championship was bad
, but the spinner United States Championship was a farcical design that had no right being approved for use on television, such is the damage it did to the eyes of anyone who saw it. Maintaining its core United States theme, the belt was bedazzled in the same mutated manner as a kindergartner’s artwork.

Orlando Jordan, the only United States Champion other than John Cena who had the displeasure of holding this design aloft, torched it on a pre-WrestleMania 21 SmackDown, and would reinstate the old United States Championship from that point forward. Replicas of this championship can still be purchased via WWE Shop for the questionable price of $314.99.

Co-WWE Women’s Championship

LayCool Deemed Themselves Co-Champions

WWE has scarcely nailed the vision of its female championships.

The almost-misogynistic butterfly design of the Divas Championship
, the bland Women’s Tag Team Championships introduced in 2019, and the main roster singles titles, which are just replicas of their male counterparts, are all blatantly without a creative direction – but it doesn’t get much worse than hacking a championship with a pair of scissors.

Layla and Michelle McCool deemed themselves co-champions following the Women’s and Divas Championships being unified at Night of Champions 2010, and as such, they took one belt – the Women’s Championship – and cut it in half, holding one half each. The move was senseless; if two championships were unified, there were already two belts in use, rendering this gesture entirely pointless. It lasted all of three months, naturally.

Copper WWE Tag Team Championships

The New Design Replaced Some Immortal Championships

WWE, in 2010, introduced a new design for the Tag Team Championships. Until their debut, the defending champions had been enduring a lengthy process through customs whenever they traveled, owing to WWE’s incessant decision to keep both the World Tag Team Championships from RAW and the WWE Tag Team Championships from SmackDown in operation.

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Every WWE Tag Team Championship Belt Design, Ranked Worst To Best

WWE has had several different belt designs for its Tag Team Championships. But which were the best, and which were worst?

When The Hart Dynasty trailed out the new titles, though, fans worldwide begged WWE to bring back their predecessors. The new titles lacked character, itself a direct representation of WWE’s doubles division at the time, and were bronze in color. Egregiously, the design lasted six years, and even then, it remained the base template for the new RAW and SmackDown Tag Team Championships following the 2016 Draft, albeit with red and blue straps, respectively.

AEW American Championship

It Briefly Replaced The Gorgeous AEW International Championship

The debuting of a customized championship
is a trend that must be brought to a permanent end. Not only are these designs regularly shambolic, but they devalue whichever championship history they’re part of: there’s a reason, for instance, the legitimacy of the AEW TNT Championship began falling off once every new champion began debuting their own spin on the title.

AEW’s International Championship hasn’t been safe from this either, as once MJF shockingly toppled Will Ospreay for the prize in 2024, he not only replaced it, but renamed it, too. Now the AEW American Championship, the belt was a sickly red, white, and blue monstrosity that made John Cena’s spinner United States Championship look like the Big Gold Belt.

MJF’s lame ‘American Hero’ facade
, which he dropped immediately after the title, further emphasized the rotten design.

GFW Women’s Championship

Its Green Ident Looked Like A Mistake

There are certain colors with which you don’t put on a wrestling championship, green being one of them. Unfortunately for Jeff Jarrett’s hilariously short-lived Global Force Wrestling, green was its foremost prominent identifying color, and was plastered over its four championships, but none looked as hideous as the GFW Women’s Championship.

Globe-heavy on the plate front, the paintwork looks cracked and could have been done with another coat as, under certain lights, it looks as if it were haphazardly spraypainted with an ugly shade of green. The all-silver plating is also a dubious choice as, in the same sense as the copper WWE Tag Team Championships, an aspiring champion declaring they want a piece of the silver doesn’t quite ring the same bell as setting out on a quest for gold.

WWE 24/7 Championship

WWE’s Attempts At Reviving The Hardcore Championship Failed

An argument can be made that WWE’s 24/7 Championship was never to be taken seriously, given that it was held by everyone from WWE Superstars to former NFL players to Santa Claus – but its grotesquely green appearance didn’t make it worth fighting over.

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24/7 Championship: Why WWE’s Successor To The Hardcore Title Failed

As the successor to the Hardcore Title, the 24/7 Championship never captured the fun that its predecessor had in WWE.

Much like the GFW Women’s Championship, WWE brazenly went for green as the 24/7 belt’s primary color: muddy green, that is. Coupled with stale gold plating created a bigger mismatch than Adnan Virk and WWE commentary, resulting in audible groans from the live audience when Mick Foley revealed it, and even bigger groans when it was hilariously binned, sort of, by Nikki Cross.

Green WWF Championship

Wrestling Promotions Have Long Had A Fixation With Green Belts

The modernistic obsession with green that soured WWE’s 24/7 Championship, GFW’s Women’s Championship, and other titles isn’t a new fixation and, disturbingly, there is no championship safe from its gluttonous color scheme: the WWE Championship was green for a short while.

Green for only fourteen months, the WWE title design swapped between The Iron and Sheik and Hulk Hogan had other blunders, such as its needlessly enormous centerplate and a title history carved onto the sideplates. The latter of those design choices was a neat concept, but it grew impossible fast, as the sizing of these plates allowed for only the first eight titleholders to be recognized, meaning that by the time The Iron Sheik got his hands on the strap, he didn’t have a place to sit.

Original AEW TNT Championship

The Championship Was Unfinished At The Time Of Its Debut

All Elite Wrestling unashamedly admitted that the TNT Championship awarded to inaugural titleholder Cody Rhodes at 2020’s Double or Nothing wasn’t the finished article as, owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, production delays prohibited ‘The American Nightmare’ from holding the blinged-out title for another three months. Indeed, Cody carried around an incomplete title until that August – and then lost it immediately(!).

Many were quick to jump to AEW’s defense when the moment played out in real-time, stating that the promotion should have been applauded for plowing ahead and that the title represented the uncertain times the world was living in, except that wasn’t the case. The bejewelled title was a step up from its original version, but AEW should have waited to crown a champion without the perfect prize complete.

WWE New York Hardcore Championship

Tommy Dreamer’s Customized Hardcore Title Was Awful

The Hardcore Championship that fans knew and loved was positively ghastly. Its origin story saw it as an old WWE title that had been smashed to pieces and taped back up, but that defined the hardcore division: it was perfectly imperfect. Tommy Dreamer’s one-night-only customized Hardcore title was an awful, lurid mess.

Designed for use in the title’s unification Ladder match in 2002, ‘The Innovator of Violence’s’ title was an old European Championship decorated in New York paraphernalia, with barbed wire strewn across the front and a kendo stick-swinging Statue of Liberty acting as the belt’s focal piece. Why, exactly, Dreamer went to the effort of customizing an already-tattered title for one night is anyone’s guess.

Immortal TNA World Heavyweight Championship

The Belt Perfectly Summarized The State Of Jeff Hardy

Wrestler-specific championship designs are rarely a success story, but Jeff Hardy’s Immortalised TNA World Heavyweight Championship was a horrid design for a promotion enduring a horrid existence. Debuted by the newly-minted heel ‘Charismatic Enigma’ following the debut of the Immortal faction, the design was purple in color and atrocious in look.

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Every World Championship In TNA History, Ranked By Design

TNA has had numerous world title designs for their men and women’s divisions. However, not all of them have been as good as others.

Featuring a masked head as its centerpiece and four irregularly shaped sideplates, the dreadful design depreciated the little prestige that the TNA World Championship had been able to mount in its three-year existence. Bleakly, this illustrated

the struggles at the time of Jeff Hardy perfectly
.