When AEW first started, one of the main ideas from a booking standpoint would be bringing back the old notion that wins and losses actually matter. You can’t lose 20 matches in a row and still expect a championship match just because you had a problem with someone three years ago, you had to put together a string of wins that would put in title contention, and in turn the top five of the company’s ranking system.

The men’s, women’s, and tag team divisions were all given separate rankings where the more a wrestler or tag team won, the higher they would climb up the ranks. The higher their ranking, the more likely they were to get a title shot. It was a very straight forward way of building anticipation for an upcoming pay-per-view as you could see someone picking up a string of big victories and gradually moving up the rankings to the point where they would become the top contender. The rankings system was also part of the reason why, outside of Double or Nothing 2021, every AEW Men’s World Championship match was a straight one-on-one contest as there a champion and a definitive number one contender.

As 2022 rolled on, the rankings became more of a hindrance than a help. The introduction of the AEW TBS, World Trios, and All-Atlantic Championships meant that people outside of the traditional top five started to say that they wanted title shots, even though they weren’t ranked and hadn’t picked up enough wins. However, if that person can get a shot at the drop of a hat, why can’t another person? Things started to get very complicated and eventually the rankings were quietly dropped from the company, with only the win/loss record being shown on a wrestler’s lower third nameplate, and even those are changed to fit a certain story beat.

Throughout 2023, fans started to ask where the rankings had gone. The answer was that they got in the way of AEW being able to set up matches that didn’t have to rely on wins and losses in order to matter, something that even CM Punk mentioned while he was part of the company. Tony Khan is a man who listens to his fans a lot of the time and at the start of 2024, the rankings made a miraculous return, with then AEW Men’s World Champion Samoa Joe stating that someone had to be ranked in order to face him for the title. It was a big deal to bring back the rankings and it was played up as such on TV, but after Joe lost the title to Swerve Strickland, those same rankings quietly went away again, and have stayed gone ever since.

It’s a shame because when they worked, the rankings made AEW’s brand of storytelling feel different to what WWE was producing at the time. However, they got canned, were brought back, and canned again within 18 months, and nobody talks about it.