Strong, Silent and Built To Suffer: The Artful Agony of Utami Hayashishita

By: David Hayter

On 23 May 2026, with Saya Kamitani lingering in the ring contemplating her first tentative steps without the World of STARDOM Championship, an utterly alien, yet strangely familiar sound began to swell within Korakuen Hall. Within seconds, the portentous, quasi-operatic, and proudly regal tones of STARDOM’s ultimate big boss battle theme were reverberating off the hallowed walls once more. Not mere entrance music, but the soundtrack to STARDOM’s glorious rebirth during the dark depths of the COVID-19 pandemic – the very song that ushered in the arrival of the promotion’s ‘Omega vs Okada’ moment, opening the eyes of the western world to joshi wrestling once more.

It is also the sound of the promotion’s distant and unreconciled past. It may have only been two years since it was last played, but it might as well have been an eternity, because so very much has changed. In the interim, STARDOM has made thousands upon thousands of new fans all across Japan, many of whom are sitting within the confines of Korakuen Hall on this fateful night, hearing Utami Hayashishita’s theme for the very first time – and what a strange sight she is to behold. STARDOM’s prodigal daughter has returned, but as neither a transcendent champion nor a repentant traitor. She doesn’t seek to whip the crowd into a frenzy or make anything resembling a scene; instead she seems adrift, both present and absent, as she almost apologetically shrugs into shot draped in her understatedly cool, yet utterly un-showy, denim jacket. She’s not so much living in the moment as observing it, operating, as she always has, within her own head, giving precious little away.

When she steps into the ring to stand across from Saya Kamitani, the subtext is screaming through the television screen: the two most iconic and important World of STARDOM Champions of the modern era are finally face-to-face. The former stablemates, former tag team champions, the one who turned heel and the one who stayed true, the one who left and the one who stayed behind. Were this any other promotion or any other top star, commentators would be yelling, lights would be flashing, and this would be a moment of cinematic grandeur writ large, but this is Utami Hayashishita – and she is introverted to the core.

When Saya finally turns to face Utami, they don’t speak, they simply stare at one another. Utami’s face is an impenetrable, but ever-so-slightly sorrowful, mask of words left unspoken, while Saya’s ever-fragile façade allows emotion to slip through the cracks; a quasi-disgusted, accusatory squint here, a nervous gulp of breath there, and a permanent look of strained disbelief adorns her face, as though she’s laying her eyes on something so distinctly familiar, yet inherently out of place.

Few moments in wrestling, let alone debuts (or, in this case, re-debuts), so perfectly capture the fundamental essence of a wrestler quite like this one. This was Utami in her truest form; strong and uncertain, cool and quiet, visibly in her feelings, while ardently refusing to express them. For Utami Hayashishita is a pay-per-view-headlining superstar like no other: a confounding, contradictory and phenomenally talented prodigy who was singled out for stardom from her earliest days, despite never quite fitting the mould or being the ace she was supposedly destined to be. This, therefore, on her return to STARDOM, is our attempt to shed some light on the curious case of Utami Hayashishita, the queen of reserve.

© STARDOM

The Anatomy Of A Star, Utami: Prototype Superstar or Sheepish Misfit?

The first question you might well be asking yourself, having read the above, is simply: how on earth did someone like Utami become a superstar in the first place? Quiet, reserved, and thoughtful aren’t exactly words that go hand in hand with professional wrestling; this is a highly bastardised form of showbusiness after all. The simplest and most straightforward answer to that question might be a little crass…just look at her. Utami was singled out as a champion wrestler from day one. She has the strong, powerful and imposing frame of a King’s Road bomb thrower, combined with the thick thighs and bottom-heavy build of one of the great lucha libre bases. But rather than looking like some hulking colossus à la Bozilla, Utami herself is undeniably elegant. Blessed with both a soft expressiveness and chiselled, androgynous features, she has the kind of ice-cool look destined to make straight girls question their sexuality.

Unsurprisingly, Utami is an undercover fashionista, who loves to combine low-effort, ice-cool streetwear with tailored ikemen-style suits modelled on her favourite male J-pop idols. Inside the ring, she has one of the most distinctive colour palettes in wrestling, marrying the red highlights that run through her asymmetric undercut with black, silver and occasionally gold. Her aesthetics have always been immaculate, coming to the ring with a single red rose in hand (her signature symbol) that she hands to a female fan on the way to the ring (normally with a slightly defeated expression when she realises that the fan in question is almost invariably sporting Cosmic Angels merchandise). She is, as she has always knowingly and playfully described herself, “Cool, Royal and Handsome”.

So it would seem that Utami has it all; she’s strong, stylish and assertive. Well actually, about that last part. Utami’s defining character trait is her strange sense of self-censorship. This perception that, as a character, she always seems to be, if not actively hesitating, then forever formulating: thinking, feeling, trying to find the right words and leaving this great void of silence for other, more extroverted, wrestlers to fill. There is a temptation for many to say that Utami is a bad promo or, perhaps more accurately, that she isn’t really a promo at all. Instead, she’s an engrossing and utterly believable character, but one ripped from the pages of a novel, not from the poster of a blockbuster movie. She’s forever suppressed; hiding her emotions, stifling a laugh, and masking a smile. Fittingly, like most strong, silent types, Utami tends to cut loose when she’s had a drink (or three). When her cheeks redden, that’s when the zanier, late-night TikTok’ing Utami comes out to play, but that Utami rarely appears on camera.

These less certain traits make her eminently relatable as a human being, but leave both STARDOM and Marigold with a top star who is inherently difficult to promote. An ace who’ll lean back with her hands in her pockets and say only a handful of quiet, guarded words at your big launch event or simply stare silently and approvingly at her own reflection as the world moves around her.

© STARDOM

The Pain Sponge: Absorbing Every Ounce Of Agony Pro Wrestling Has To Offer

Inside the ring Utami is near faultless. She quickly caught the eye as STARDOM’s Big Red Rookie, developing at a preposterously fast rate as she rampaged towards victory in the 2020 Five Star Grand Prix en route to defeating Mayu Iwatani and capturing the World of STARDOM Championship barely two years into her career. Given her imposing build, the first attribute that grabs most fans’ attention when it comes to Utami’s work is her power, her ability to batter her opponents with lariats and send them crashing down to the mat with her brilliant Hijack Bomb finisher (a tornado-style Splash Mountain manoeuvre). However, much like Utami herself, her ringcraft is defined not by what’s on show and certainly not by making a show of herself.

Firstly, while her offence is giving brutish bulldozer, Utami is actually one of the safest and lightest workers in the business. In the Tomohiro Ishii mould, she looks like she’s beating her opponents to death, but ask them how they feel after the match, and they will tell you they barely felt a thing. Then there’s the one ability that really sets Utami apart from the crowd, which has defined her career to date and forms the basis of her celebrated main-event match style: her unparalleled capacity for selling. Simply put, Utami is an expert in agony. She uses her pronounced jawline to masterfully exude an ache that you can feel through your television screen as she grimaces and grinds her teeth. It sounds over the top, but it’s not; Utami is a master of micro-gestures, using her powers of repression to wear the expression of someone who is going to take a deep breath, centre herself and let the pain soak into her body in waves.

Whether her leg is being kicked to bits by Takumi Iroha, her head’s getting caved in by Syuri, or she’s being dumped on her neck by Sareee, Utami has all the understated mannerisms necessary to write a slowly evolving tableau of pain that unfolds beautifully across a 30-minute main-event match. The secret to Utami’s selling is her very human desire to disguise and suppress her pain. She is the polar opposite of STARDOM’s other great sellers: she won’t howl in anguish like Starlight Kid or get squished like an adorable cartoon bug in the Natsupoi vein, and she certainly doesn’t contort and collapse her body into grotesque shapes as she flies through the air like a discarded accordion, à la her toxic BFF Saya Kamitani. Instead, Utami’s approach to agony is immensely relatable, like someone who’s just stubbed their toe on a hard table edge or pulled their back lifting a heavy box; a wince will consume her face and, watching at home, you share a telepathic and sympathetic groan as you watch her shove down a silent scream and slowly trudge back into the action.

It’s not just facial expressions, however; when it comes to bumping, Utami is an absolute maniac. That regard for safety that she displays when she’s dealing with her opponents’ bodies? Well, she shows no such concern for her own health. Utami is a thickly built woman, and she goes up heavy and she comes down really bloody hard. In short, she is a truly brilliant bumper, but her signature bumping style is not one that I’d recommend to any rational human being. Utami loves to land high and hard on her neck and shoulders, really sinking down hard into the mat, before using that momentum to push down so intensely that she doesn’t so much flip over, as allow the pressure to build to the point where it becomes too much to bear and the raw tension forces her body to violently squirm out from under itself in one sudden spasm. This gruesome process invariably deposits her flat on her belly like roadkill, normally with a weary but determined expression on her face that reads, “Fuck my life.”

© STARDOM

The Golden Age Of Utami Ends At The Hands Of Her Ideal Opponent

Believe it or not, this walking pain sponge proved incredibly difficult to beat and soon developed a match layout and narrative structure entirely based around her ability to absorb punishment. Utami Hayashishita, as the World of STARDOM Champion, became the master of enduring, outlasting and eventually overcoming her opponents. She might not have had the ability to overwhelm with dazzling offence, and she certainly couldn’t run faster or leap higher than practically any of STARDOM’s top talent, but she had the stamina and willpower to take their best shot and keep on marching forward until her opponents finally began to wilt.

This endure-and-outlast model was perfect for a rookie champion within the confines of a promotion that had a veritable murderers’ row of elite-level, ultra-hard-hitting challengers to push Utami to her limit. She was in wrestling heaven. Across 11 brilliant title matches she would eat Momo’s heavy leg lariats, survive Iroha’s whiplash-inducing head kicks, be bamboozled as Saya Kamitani’s gangly frame flipped out of all her power moves, and hold on for dear life as Bea Priestley cyclone-suplexed her into oblivion – always safe in the knowledge that if she just hung in there long enough she would, by hook or by crook, come out on top.

Utami, from a narrative point of view, appeared unbeatable – that is, until she finally stood across the ring from her perfect opponent: the equal and opposite force that is Syuri. Utami had the endurance and resolve to outlast conventional championship-level challengers, but in Syuri she discovered her kryptonite: the ultimate fighting machine, precision-engineered to dissect her opponents with impeccable efficiency while wearing the stone face of a killer. Syuri had no wasted motion, she wasn’t going to tire and it was never going to get easier. When they faced off on 12 June 2021 it was wrestling nirvana: the immovable object having seven shades of shit kicked out of her by a truly irresistible force. As the ring bell chimed to signal a 30-minute time-limit draw and the pair agreed to overtime, watching at home, it felt as though Utami needed her very own Marge Simpson at ringside to scream: “Homie, she’s not going to get tired, you’ve got to fight back!”

Utami did, of course, fight back, summoning up just enough offence to meet Syuri in the middle of the ring to deliver a memorable double knockout finish, but the writing was on the wall. Utami had met her match and, when they rematched in December, Syuri walked away with the World of STARDOM Championship. Syuri and Utami were perfect dance partners, complete with contrasting skill sets ideally suited to bring out the absolute best in one another, delivering matches so good the word spread around the world, unleashing a tidal wave of momentum and ushering in a new era of global relevance for STARDOM.

© STARDOM

Trouble In Paradise: Golden Phoenixes Are High Maintenance And Black Peaches Are Nothing But Trouble

Unfortunately, as much as we would sincerely love to, we do not possibly have the time or the space to explain the intricate spider’s web of frayed emotions that Utami Hayashishita sits right at the heart of within STARDOM. Just rest assured in the knowledge that despite being the serious, regal and somewhat stoic faction of their day, the now-defunct Queen’s Quest was full of absolute drama llamas. Poor understated Utami found herself stuck between the treacherous Momo Watanabe and her temperamental, but ultimately loyal, tag team partner Saya Kamitani. Simply put, it was never going to last and the unavoidable, slow-motion car crash that was the demise of Queen’s Quest would come to a head in June 2023.

The faction was in a rut. Utami had lost the World of STARDOM Championship, but had earned the leadership of her unit after Momo turned heel, while Saya was fresh from dropping the Wonder of STARDOM Championship and was growing ever more frustrated with her lot in life. With Momo Watanabe and Natsuko Tora dripping poison in her ear, Saya was beginning to recognise that her faction leader had become something of a hapless and uninspiring loser. Utami was drifting between time-limit draws and defeats (including one to Saya herself) with nothing resembling a sense of direction and, so the storyline went, she was dragging Queen’s Quest down with her. All of this was not helped by Utami’s inability to articulate her emotions or rally the troops. As one disappointing defeat followed another, all she could seem to do was gaze at an increasingly huffy Kamitani with a forlorn and doleful expression.

Things would go from bad to worse for AphroditE and Queen’s Quest. Not only were Saya and Utami losing, but they were beginning to have communication breakdowns in the ring, with Saya accidentally heel-kicking Utami during tour show matches and the pair sharing increasingly fraught and frustrated glances. With tensions rising to unsustainable levels the feuding factions would decide to settle their differences inside a steel cage, with the entirety of Queen’s Quest, led by Utami, going against Oedo Tai, spearheaded by the betrayer-in-chief Momo Watanabe. What would follow was one of the greatest matches and most sensational single performances in STARDOM history. Taking the role of the selfless hero in this escape-the-cage-rules match, Utami would not only take a bloody and brutal beating from each and every member of Oedo Tai, but she would dive in front of bullets for her teammates, shepherding them towards freedom at the expense of her own physical safety.

This was a Sisyphean effort from Utami; a masterclass in self-flagellation, brutalising her own body not to atone for her own sins (because truthfully she was blameless in-storyline), but to prove the validity of her love for her unit in the only way she knew how – through personal suffering. This was the strong, silent type leading from the front, stepping forward to soak up all the pain and shield her friends from harm. As one Queen’s Quest member slipped away to safety after another, Utami was eventually left all alone, and what came next wasn’t pretty.

In a crazy spot atop the chain-link cage, Utami would come crashing directly down, scraping her face along the metal, only to emerge drenched in blood. Summoning all her powers of endurance she would soldier on and somehow, shakily, climb to the top of the cage once more. Hazy and dazed, she would be confronted with the sight of both Watanabe and Kamitani scrabbling up from the floor to intercept her. When they approached, Momo would hand Saya a baseball bat, giving her the chance to rid herself of this beaten, bloodied and useless Utami once and for all. In a perfect punch-the-sky feel-good moment, after a brief hesitation, Saya, having witnessed the love and leadership that Utami could never articulate in words made real through self-sacrificial action, of course chose to blast Momo and Tora with the bat and offer her hand to help pull Utami up and over to safety. The pair would share one final poignant, pregnant pause atop the cage, staring into one another’s eyes; Saya’s face screaming with emotion, Utami’s blood-caked and impassive. All was right in the world.

But it wouldn’t last. Utami would leave, abandoning Saya Kamitani to a chaotic and disastrous leadership of Queen’s Quest – and the next time Momo Watanabe came to kill off her old unit, she would succeed. In a humiliating gesture, the unit would be forced to disband and this time, when it was Saya’s turn to stand up and protect her Queen’s Quest protégés, she too would last until the very end against Oedo Tai, only to come up short with no Utami to rally her. Saya Kamitani was left crushingly alone as the sole surviving member of Queen’s Quest; the literal standard-bearer for a dead unit and a broken friendship (don’t worry, I’m sure this dejection and rejection would have no unforeseen consequences for her character going forward).

© Marigold

The Unwilling Ace: Utami In The Wrong Place At The Wrong Time

When Rossy Ogawa shocked the world by announcing his departure from World Wonder Ring STARDOM, the promotion he had created, to found a brand new venture named Dream Star Fighting Marigold, speculation was rife as to who would follow him out the door. Many, myself included, assumed that Saya Kamitani, the promotion’s young babyface star who’d been pushed extremely long and incredibly hard by Ogawa, would be the first to follow the founder to what promised to be greener pastures. But Utami’s onscreen will-they, won’t-they work-wife and rival chose to stay; and instead, alongside Ogawa, stood Giulia (who’d made no secret of her desire to leave), Rossy’s pet project Mai Sakurai, the super rookie Yuzuki, MIRAI (then an ultra-talented midcard prospect), and, standing there nonchalantly as if she’d just wandered into the wrong room and was too embarrassed to walk back out, was Hayashishita.

Utami’s early days in Marigold were strange, to say the least. She seemed genuinely happy, but in an odd and unusual way. She was active on social media, posting joyous and occasionally drunken pictures showing off her brand new tongue piercing. Despite her oddly exuberant mood and the inherent uncertainty of starting afresh, the fledgling promotion seemed ideally positioned. The attention-grabbing superstar Giulia would have to leave shortly for WWE, but the promotion was in safe hands. Even if Mayu Iwatani was stuck under contract for another year, Marigold had the ultimate ace. They had Utami, STARDOM’s greatest champion, ready to rip it up with a fresh roster and some eye-catching outsiders in the form of the giant Bozilla and the one-and-only Sareee. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, this is where the fundamental cracks in Utami’s game began to appear. In Marigold she was in a completely new environment, surrounded by green-as-grass youngsters pinched from AWG, some actively bad wrestlers, and some superb talents waiting to break out on a bigger stage (see Miku Aono). Utami was no longer an upstart champion supported by a roster teeming with the best women’s wrestlers on the planet. Instead, she was (arguably) the most celebrated joshi wrestler in the world at that moment in time and this was her opportunity to carry an entire promotion. Giulia and Sareee would lay the groundwork in the initial months, but Utami would win the inaugural Dream Star GP and be champion by the end of the year. It didn’t matter that STARDOM had the treacherous (in Ogawa’s eyes) Tam Nakano or that gangly goof Kamitani, because Marigold had Utami Hayashishita.

At this point in the narrative, if you are listening to the wrong people, you will be told that Utami in Marigold was lazy, that she had lost a step, that her work was boring and slow or that she simply didn’t have the drive to be a champion – these people are wrong (but understandably so). Those fantastic, show-stealing skills we discussed above were present in Utami’s Marigold work. From her first appearance in that incredible all-star tag team main event at “Marigold Fields Forever” against Sareee & Bozilla, through to her final run of matches (most notably with the rookie Seri Yamaoka), Utami put her all into every performance. During Marigold’s frankly insane touring schedule, in the cold winter months and horridly humid summers alike, you would find Utami landing on her neck time and time again, no matter how small the audience.

The problem was not, therefore, Utami’s work or her work ethic: it was a question of philosophy and understanding what was needed in her new environment. The issue for Utami in Marigold was that she was fundamentally the same old Utami who was the best wrestler in the world in STARDOM. She wanted to endure and overcome, she wanted to give her opponents the bulk of the match, take a real beating and eke out a heroic comeback victory. Unfortunately, Marigold didn’t need the quiet old Utami who’d battle from behind against STARDOM’s conveyor belt of champions in waiting; they needed a confident, swaggering, dominant ace capable of grabbing the company by the scruff of the neck and blasting their well-meaning rookies into oblivion. In other words, they needed a cocksure Giulia or an irrationally intense Sareee, not a humble Hayashishita. More than anything, Marigold desperately needed Utami to be an ace and an alpha both in and out of the ring. They needed someone selfish, assertive and extrovert, and they got someone selfless, passive and introverted.

The truth is that even if Utami had been the leader that Marigold needed, Rossy Ogawa may have mishandled her in any case. Utami would do everything in her power to put over the next great star of Marigold, Miku Aono (the promotion’s good-looking, well-spoken, hard-kicking, iron woman), but bizarrely, despite having everything a promotion could look for in an ace, Aono has found herself floundering with directionless creative that paints their signature champion as an afterthought. Nevertheless, Utami cannot escape the blame; while she tweaked her look and presentation, she never truly embraced the urgency of the moment. She never became a killer, instead choosing to remain a subdued survivor.

Reading the above you might reasonably get the impression that Utami is a perma-chilled, giving sort, who’s not overly fussed about soaking in the spotlight. However, never underestimate or presume to understand what is going on inside a wrestler’s head, because, while Utami is a cool, calm and nonchalant character, that doesn’t mean she lacks ambition. After all, a human being can be both selfless and proud, easy-going and driven. Utami didn’t become the best wrestler in the world without caring deeply about her craft and fixing her mind and training her body to reach the very top. For it turns out, while Utami was sitting in Marigold wrestling in front of ever-dwindling (although still impressive by start-up standards) crowds, she was watching her onscreen understudy and tag team partner Saya Kamitani not only become the World of STARDOM Champion, but the Tokyo Sports MVP and an honest-to-goodness television star.

It is unlikely that the real-life Utami actually resents Kamitani’s success. Beneath the kayfabe bitterness she expresses in press interviews there is clearly an undercurrent of appreciation for what Saya and STARDOM have achieved in her absence, but the element of professional envy certainly seems real enough. After all, while Saya was breaking down the ultimate glass ceiling by forcing the crusty old boys’ club that is Tokyo Sports to name her as MVP, Utami wasn’t even named Marigold’s MVP in her championship year. Despite being a kayfabe award, Utami seems to have taken this personally, likely because in Japan these internal promotional awards are often doled out on the basis of seniority, with the champion or ace winning regardless of what is going on lower down the card. In any case, Utami believed she’d been snubbed, and being overlooked by Ogawa appeared to cut her deeply. In April 2026 her contract would expire, and with little fanfare word seeped out that she had no intention of renewing it, paving the way for her return to STARDOM.

© STARDOM

I Just Can’t Quit You, Babe: Endless Baggage And A Heartwarming Recovery

We come full circle. Utami is back in STARDOM, exactly where she was always destined to be – still struggling to find the words, caught beneath the weight of her emotions, and quietly fumbling her way through a landscape of ultra-dramatic, uber-charismatic, larger-than-life stars. She is in heaven, doing what she loves in the ring, while her forever stifled personality allows others to project a more rounded and complex version of themselves out into the world. The on-screen reactions of her peers have been fascinating to watch, as STARDOM gleefully blurs the lines between storyline and reality with each passing match. Utami was wholeheartedly embraced and swept up into the muscle-bound arms of a jubilant Saya Iida in an undeniably sweet moment of reunion on one show, but soon found herself wearing the apologetic face of regret as she was chastised by her former wards AZM and Miyu Amasaki, who felt abandoned by Utami at a key time in their lives.

Then, of course, there’s Saya Kamitani. She is so totally over Utami, like honestly, she doesn’t think about her at all, she’s certainly not refreshing her feed every 15 seconds to see if she’s posted and she would never send a toxic tweet – no way, not her. In fact, Saya’s way too busy having her own internal meltdown and crisis of confidence within H.A.T.E. to care about anything else (which certainly wasn’t spurred on by a shock defeat to Utami at STARDOM’s “The Conversion”). It’s funny how these things work out, that a softening of Kamitani’s character should just so happen to coincide, not only with Utami’s return, but with the dramatic disintegration of Saya’s uneasy truce with arch-nemesis-turned-ally Momo Watanabe. Fittingly, both Saya (the very vision of a stroppy, exasperated, lovesick teenager) and Utami (the forever put-upon and diffident adult) appear to be drifting into friendless isolation at the exact same time (I hope it works out them, I really do).

Nevertheless, while Utami the character may lack companionship, Utami the wrestler is flourishing. She has been parachuted into the heart of an ungodly stacked roster that is simply overflowing with incredible talent, both new and old, ready and willing to lay an almighty beating on the best seller in professional wrestling today. None more so than the freshly crowned World of STARDOM Champion, Suzu Suzuki, who brilliantly brutalised Utami in an instant-classic showdown at Korakuen Hall on 30 June. After so long lost in the wilderness, Utami has alighted upon a never-ending list of formidable foes to outlast and overcome once more.

Finally, it is impossible to avoid reflecting on the stark contrast between Utami’s farewell appearance at Korakuen Hall as a member of the Marigold roster and her main-event debut with STARDOM this past week. The last time she wrestled in this building, her performance was stellar and her peers were supportive, but it was a depressing spectacle, taking place in front of a generously announced crowd of a little over 600, who sat on their hands as she waved goodbye to a wall of empty orange seats. Just a few months later she’s standing in the exact same spot, wrestling in front of a packed house of 1,487, who are actively chanting her name as she goes to war with her latest wrestling soulmate. And this time, when she looks out into the Korakuen crowd she sees something entirely new, a sea of young female STARDOM fans excitedly waiting to be handed her rose (you can’t help but smile).

By David Hayter

© Sendai Girls Pro Wrestling

Spirits From The Earth

Sendai Girls’ success shows that wrestling’s future doesn’t have to be bound by its past

By Chris Gannon

In August of last year, I attended a special screening of Gaea Girls, hosted at the Everyman Cinema in Islington, with a special Q&A with director Kim Longinotto and Meiko Satomura. Gaea Girls is an extraordinary documentary; filmed in 2000, Longinotto and her crew were given an incredible amount of access to Chigusa Nagayo’s company GAEA and spent months conducting interviews, filming shows and practices, presenting it all without commentary or editorialisation. What you see is what you get. And what you get is brutal.

Nagayo spent parts of the documentary emotionally and physically abusing trainees, then referring to the trainees as her children. Later in an interview, she described her difficult relationship with her father, which left the viewer wondering if Chigusa understands what a healthy child-parent relationship could be like. In the film’s most infamous scene, during a sparring session, Meiko Satomura dropkicked a trainee, who she is frustrated with, in the face causing a disgusting sound. The film then cut to Satomura spending minutes berating the trainee, shaken with a profusely bleeding mouth and a cut that would need several stitches to close.

With the world of professional wrestling, especially in Japan at that time, it’s fair to ask how much of what you’re watching is real, even for something as candid as this documentary. How much less harsh would the training have been had there not been cameras there to film it? Would Nagayo have paintbrushed a distraught trainee so much, whilst telling her how disappointed she was in her? Did she really have such an awful relationship with her father that she wanted to kill him? It’s not so much a case of if what you’re watching is true, so much as how much of it is, and how what’s real is used as part of the presentation that the wrestlers want to give. Even if what the wrestlers showed to Longinotto was exaggerated, the evidence that this was a tough regime to go through shines through again and again, with trainees doing literally hundreds of squats per training session as a warm up, with one shot showing a stark contrast in leg size between those who were new to the company and those who were experienced. The sweat was real. The blood was real. The tears – they definitely felt real.

In the Q&A session afterwards, Satomura talked about how she had not seen the documentary since it was made, and I think even she was shocked by the brutality of the part of the film she is most well known for. She talked about the problems with the sort of training that had been shown in the film. Not enough new trainees were getting to the point of debuting and the ones who did burned out quickly. Most importantly, though, no regard was given to the mental health and well-being of the wrestlers. Clearly a quarter of a century removed from that time, Satomura is a different person, with a different approach to how a company, especially one with its own training school, should be run, and now thanks to a youtube documentary series, Senjo Spirit: The Road To Nippon Budokan, we get to see that different approach in action. 

© Sendai Girls Pro Wrestling

A New Beginning

After the closure of GAEA in 2005 due to Nagayo’s second (but far from final) retirement, Satomura, along with Jinsei Shinzaki, founded Sendai Girls in Sendai, the capital of the Miyagi prefecture, about 300 km north of Tokyo. The initial shows were made up of an undercard featuring veterans from LLPW and AJW against the Sendai trainees and a main event of Satomura against one of the bigger stars of the scene. The business strategy was very much slow and steady for those first few years whilst they developed the roster, sticking around the Miyagi prefecture for the first few years before venturing to Osaka, then Kawasaki, Tokushima and finally debuting in Tokyo in 2011. The story of Sendai Girls’ progress has always been one of slow and steady growth, with solid in-ring action as the selling point. They didn’t even create titles for the promotion until 2015, at Satomura’s 20th anniversary show. With Satomura’s retirement in 2025, Chihiro Hashimoto has stepped into the role as the figurehead wrestler for the company, and at her own 10th anniversary show in November last year, announced her ambition for Sendai Girls to run a show at the legendary Nippon Budokan hall. As part of the promotional effort for that eventual show, Sendai began releasing Senjo Spirit.

Fairy Spirit

Since January, Sendai Girls have been releasing videos on youtube featuring the work life of the company, with our own Chris Whitehead commenting that it often feels like a workplace comedy similar to The Office. The crew follows the wrestlers around and films the wrestlers’ activities, occasionally punctuating them with interviews. We get to see the behind the scenes, more mundane work that goes into putting on the shows like setting out seats, selling tickets, training, eating together. Through it all, you start to get a sense of the people who you might only otherwise see on your TV screen for twenty minutes every couple of weeks. There’s the company veterans like Chihiro Hashimoto, DASH Chisako and Mika Iwata, freelancers-turned-full time roster member Miyuki Takase, younger wrestlers like Yurika Oka (the subject of an excellent “Wrestler You Should Know About” article by Chris Whitehead), YUNA and Manami, foreign talent like Spike Nishimura from America, Stephanie Maze from Germany, Safire Reed from England and Anita Vaughan from Ireland, company president Meiko Satomura and last, but by no means least, the latest trainee Reina Takano.

We get to see a lot of the out-of-competition personality of the wrestlers shine through, getting to see Mika Iwata smiling and laughing more in any minute she’s on screen than her entire wrestling career, Yurika Oka’s various spending troubles, Hashimoto’s thoughts about romance and much more. We see the roster doing a day of farming chores for the rice business that supplements the group’s income, a day of roster members taking promo photos, visiting businesses to make deals for distributing tickets, various informal language-exchange sessions between the foreign and domestic wrestlers, and training. There is a lot of footage of training, particularly in episode 38.

© Sendai Girls Pro Wrestling

Ichi, Ni, San

Episode 38 of the series is an uncut version of a training session from the previous episode. It is filled with lots of conditioning training, like roster members running 100 metres whilst carrying two colleagues, a lot of sparring and practicing of fundamentals. Hashimoto runs these sessions with a no-nonsense attitude and it’s clear that this is hard, hard work. Along with perfecting techniques for moves, you’ll also hear lessons about the performance aspect of wrestling, like how to move around the ring so all of the audience connects with the match or how to wordlessly communicate with an opponent so neither of you is lost in the moment after a move is performed. There are lessons that go well beyond how to best launch into a dropkick.

The rookie, Reina Takano, participates fully in these sessions and, as is to be expected, makes mistakes as she’s learning, and when she does and Hashimoto needs to talk to her about it she is stern, but not cruel. She informs Takano about what she did wrong and what she needs to do to correct, but she does not berate her or try to use any negative reinforcement. You can’t imagine Hashimoto ever slapping Takano as she tells her how disappointed she is in her, can never imagine her walking away as Takano follows her in a flood of tears begging for forgiveness. Throughout the session, you’ll hear laughter and joy, sure, but no one is joking around and there’s a clear level of respect between everyone, and while Hashimoto is running the sessions, it’s obvious that she’s sustaining an atmosphere created by Satomura. Twenty six years on from that dropkick, no trainee needs to be afraid when stepping inside the Sendai Girls dojo.

The President Is Watching

Episode 40 was released a week later featuring another training session, albeit with a special guest: Meiko Satomura herself. As the session continued, Satomura stood back, eyes open but her face never betraying any reactions to what she was seeing, taking it all in. After a 4 v 3 sparring session, Satomura remarked with admiration that Takano didn’t appear to be intimidated at all. She then asked Takano for her thoughts on the session before providing feedback on her reactions and fighting stance. All provided calmly as advice from someone with three decades of in-ring experience and two decades as a promoter. She suggested to Takano that her offence should be based more around kicks than elbows, and to really drive it home, picked up a couple of boxing pads, and still in her business attire (including an incredibly smart looking lilac jacket) and with the assistance of Mika Iwata, helped Takano train her kicks, developed her fighting stance and worked on her lock ups.

At the end of the practice she informed Takano that she would be performing her pro-test, the test that every trainee must pass before they can make their professional debut in public, on the June 13th Sendai Pit show.

After the practice, Satomura talked effusively about Takano, amazed at how much her skills had developed considering she was only two months into her training.

© Sendai Girls Pro Wrestling

Same As It Ever Was?

When it comes to the wrestling business, there are so many horror stories, and so many exclamations of, “It’s a carny business, what do you expect?” For so many, there’s a belief that the business can’t change, and yet Sendai Girls is a living example that change can happen if people want it and, most importantly, make the effort needed to enact that change. Meiko Satomura has an incredible roster of trainees that she can boast about, who have all come through a system that moved away from the destructive practices of the past, and helped her build a thriving wrestling company that has outlasted so many others.

Admittedly there could be, and probably is, a level of kayfabe to what the roster shows the outside world, and things might be different when the cameras are off, but I’m willing to believe that the bloody mouths and tear-filled eyes were as close to the reality of GAEA as the harmony and joy displayed on Senjo Spirit is to the everyday lives of the roster of Sendai Girls. A better future is possible in wrestling, because in many ways, we’re already living in one.

© AEW

The Lineage of Champions

The road from Jacksonville to Wembley

By: Micah

The AEW Men’s World Championship. Sought by many. Held by few. Often the main event. Always a feature focus of the program. It has been the pinnacle of the promotion since its founding, and through the eras it has defined the top stars in the company. As we head to Wembley and what increasingly looks like a new coronation, let’s look back at what brought us here.

The Debut

AEW hit the public sphere in a reveal on a YouTube video in the early moments of January 2019. It took nearly 9 months before the first champion was crowned. The early DNA of the company’s mythos was a blend of several fan bases, often overlapping.

New Japan fans held Kenny Omega as the standard of excellence and the best wrestler alive. Rebellious ex-WWE fans itching for a fight leaned toward Cody Rhodes with his anti-attitude-era, revolution-talk antics. Chris Jericho was the legend, the icon, the one both your nan and the TV execs knew. “Hangman” Adam Page was a favorite of the BTE crowd and proclaimed that he would step up and become the first champion. Soon Jon Moxley arrived, a paradigm shift potentially bringing a wave of current WWE fans with him.

The first “Double or Nothing”, their debut PPV, set up the championship match for later that year. Hangman won a pre-show Casino Battle Royale (last eliminating MJF, starting a rivalry that continues to this day), while Chris Jericho defeated Kenny Omega, coming in as an “outsider” and defeating one of the namesake Elite.

This led to Jericho vs. Hangman at the first AEW “All Out”, and the crowning of AEW’s first Men’s World Champion.

1st Champion: Chris Jericho – August 31st, 2019 (182 Days)

The inaugural champion, or as some have trademarked, “The Cornerstone™”, Chris Jericho was the ready-made, internationally known star that executives love to see on the screen. He brought in ratings and eyeballs, and made a run out of being the heel who may not deserve the spot but is surrounded by people who keep him there.

His post-match promo from their first show set the tone. “You want to boo me, you ungrateful jerks?” Jericho panted into a mic. “It’s my time now. For months, I’ve been saying one thing: Chris Jericho IS AEW. This is not a company for the fans, this is a company for me! To prove to you the name value of Chris Jericho.”

The legend at the time, true or not, was that The Elite and their fans and the wrestling world had come together in celebration and support of pro wrestling, and that momentum spawned a company with their name on it. Jericho’s bad guy persona was here to loudly proclaim they were wrong.

Jericho’s character claimed the company was never The Elite’s, never the fans, that all of these successes were his. And his run set out to prove it. He started by beating underdog favorite ‘Hangman’ Adam Page for the belt. He beat fan favorite Darby Allin, a young upstart clearly marked for a big future. He beat Cody Rhodes in that match with the infamous ‘Cody Stip’ that doomed Rhodes to never to wrestle for the top belt again.

It was a reign filled with great bits and great promos and it helped secure AEW in the public’s eyes (and contractually with a new long-term TV deal). It had some legendary moments, and those early AEW shows are among the best they’ve ever produced.

But for the overlapping fan bases? The Omega fans Jericho “beat” to earn a shot at the title, the BTE fans hoping for a Hangman surprise win, the revolution-seeking Cody fans who were now exiled from the top of the mountain? Jericho, an ex-WWE legend guy, did prove the promotion was indeed all for him. Until the day Moxley finally took him down.

© AEW

The Pandemic

2nd Champion: Jon Moxley – February 29th, 2020 (277 days)

Jon Moxley came in as a breath of fresh air, the “top guy” who left the big show to try and shift the paradigm. He was both a famous WWE guy and also a guy who never really fit into their mold. He clearly came in determined to build something new, to forge a new identity, and to change the industry.

The AEW Men’s World Championship first changed hands on a “leap day” and the whole event felt like a changing of the seasons. Yet, instead of a triumphant era of AEW on the rise, the entire world stopped.

Less than three weeks into his reign, the pandemic brought the industry to its knees. The fledgling AEW scrambled to figure out a path forward. But, in what has become something of a pattern for Moxley, he found the company in a bad situation, hoisted it on his back, and delivered through strange aeons and empty seats alike.

His first run had some good moments, in a time when such things were hard to come by. He stood as the face of the company as fans slowly were allowed back, through the summer and into winter. And with fans back in full attendance, he passed the torch in one of the wilder endings to a “Dynamite” we’ve seen.

The Era of The Elite

3rd Champion: Kenny Omega – December 2nd, 2020 (346 days)

Back when Kenny Omega lost to Jericho, you could see a storyline payoff in the future. When he was again defeated by Jon Moxley in a lights out match, the future seemed almost inevitable.

This is the best wrestler in the world, and though he had setbacks, through grit and determination he was going to overcome and prove that he belonged. And he would prove that the movement behind and the fans and company he built belonged, when he finally and decisively defeated the former WWE guys and became the definitional world champion.

So when, in a fever-dream, Kenny Omega turned heel and joined TNA’s Don Callis, seemingly renounced the company he was with, and escaped into the night unearned with AEW’s top prize under his arm, you can see how the moment felt electric and insane.

In fact, the turn had been set up for months. Kenny had been teaming with the down-on-his-luck Hangman, and continued to have to rely on his partner to win matches for him. The story goes that Omega was good, but improbably, Hangman was better. Faced with the truth that he was being surpassed, he turned to cowardly means to hold onto his former glory. He was a bitter man clinging to a top spot he no longer, in his heart, believed he deserved.

He also went on to win the TNA World Championship and the AAA World Championship, becoming the belt collector. He made a case for being the top champion in the entire world. He had the longest reign in history. He ran all over the world and defended his gold, but he could never outrun the sense that he wasn’t truly the best.

On April 7th, 2021, the Young Bucks turned heel to join him. And so, the company named for The Elite, over two years later, finally got a run with The Elite on top. But instead of fanfare and celebration, they were set as the villains, undeserving and past their time.

Considering how important the original “All In” was to AEW’s history, and how much the wave of public momentum that carried the company to term was built on BTE and The Elite’s backs, it is a strange statement to say that the one time in AEW history that The Elite were really, truly on top…they were the bad guys.

But their villainy was all to set up the hero who would bring them down.

© AEW

4th Champion: ‘Hangman’ Adam Page – November 13th, 2021 (197 Days)

In the early days of the company, Hangman Adam Page made a promise to become the first world champion. This was a promise he ultimately couldn’t keep. But after narrative arcs where he battled depression and self-doubt and drowned himself in the bottle, he rose up. The man who believed he didn’t deserve to be Elite had finally proven his critics (and himself) wrong.

To get there, he beat Kenny Omega, a triple champion largely considered to be one of the best in the world, earned entirely while outside the American mainstream. And Hangman’s very next feud was with Bryan Danielson, arguably considered the very best from within the American mainstream. He beat two best in the world wrestlers, the best of both worlds, in back-to-back programs. Then he beat the wild and dangerous Texan, Lance Archer, in a Texas Death Match and took it as his signature match. Adam Cole – a person from his past and a standard-bearer for NXT – came calling, and Hangman beat him, too.

The guy from BTE, effectively the first homegrown AEW champ, was on his way to becoming a legend. This was the promise of the whole Elite Era. An anxious millennial cowboy, who rose past his insecurities and faults, would carry the company into a new future.

He faced off with one more ‘best in the world’, an icon from the past who represented that revolutionary, rebellious aesthetic for a previous generation of fans. The match built the case that the very best, from all eras, fight for the AEW Men’s World Championship. With one more victory, Hangman could prove he was among them.

One last WWE icon, one last ‘best in the world’ to beat. Backstage stuff aside, in the promos Hangman made another public promise, this time to protect the company from CM Punk. A promise he again failed to keep.

The Era of Punk

5th Champion: CM Punk – May 29th, 2022 (87 Days)*

This is where the lineage gets weird, in several ways. For one, in this piece I’m focusing on the stories and the character arcs and the sort of meta-kayfabe around the championship. And this is the point where that kayfabe snaps like an old rubber band. The real and the fake blend together and get hard to sort. Unlike others writing here, I haven’t worked in the industry and I’m not a scoopster. I’m a narrative guy. And this era? It’s a tricky time.

The official AEW site reports that Punk was the champ for 87 days. That’s technically true, but he injured himself within a few days of the title change and never defended it again. There’s a tournament which Moxley wins and then he becomes interim champion, which they don’t count as a full championship reign. Then, Mox wins it for real in his home state in the fastest title change to date.

© AEW

“All In”

9th Champion: MJF – November 19th, 2022 (406 days)

From the first Casino Battle Royale, it was clear MJF was destined for AEW gold. He was apprenticed to Cody Rhodes before ruining his mentor’s championship aspirations. He joined Chris Jericho and then betrayed him. He was positioned as a generational talent who would inevitably rise to the pinnacle of the sport, and though it seems likely he was originally meant to beat CM Punk (who he had a heated feud with) to start this run, defeating the ‘Ace’ of AEW was the next best thing.

The run started in a weird place. After all the hype and the years of build, MJF ended up winning the men’s world championship in the weakest position it had ever been in. To his credit, he ran with it. A banger with Ricky Starks. An incredible match with Bryan Danielson. He and Darby lead a clash in a four-way with all of AEW’s original up-and-coming “pillars”.

But the crowning achievement of the MJF run has to be AEW “All In”, against his then-new best friend Adam Cole, live from Wembley, the first mega event of the company’s history. It was obviously not all just him, but under his reign, they filled the massive Wembley stadium, set the world record for attendance (depending on how you count it), and proved that they could, under the rare and right circumstances, be even bigger than WWE.

The Brochachos run is a ‘love it or hate it’ sort of thing, and his “different flavors of ice cream” philosophy got a lot of hate, but the impact of Wembley and that moment cannot be overstated. For a time, MJF and Adam Cole were at the top of wrestling. Not just AEW wrestling, but the wrestling world.

© AEW

The New Dynasty

Yet the stars were not done being cross. CM Punk choked Jungle Boy backstage. WWE revitalized as TKO holdings. Adam Cole blew out his wheels on a simple run-in. The regrettable Jay White feud. The masked devil storyline became convoluted and snakebit.

The monumental MJF run, which started as a generational reign, collapsed with a whimper. Samoa Joe won the belt in a mercy killing as the injured & wounded MJF snuck off into the distance.

10th Champion: Samoa Joe – December 30th, 2023 (113 days)

Samoa Joe came in as a much-needed reset. He portrayed himself as a clever competitor, much more as a sports figure, someone who studied the game and survived the years. He was deadly and clever, brutal when he needed to be.

It was a breath of fresh air, and although he at first felt like a transitional champ given a gold watch for his service, he quickly developed a new vibe. It was different and it needed to be. It broadened the idea of what an AEW championship run could be. In many ways, this run and Darby’s later run are similar. Both were sort of out of nowhere, they both were non-standard and set a new tone, and both were ultimately just a footnote in the greater narrative.

11th Champion: Swerve Strickland – April 21, 2024 (126 days)

Swerve Strickland, on the back of an incredible rivalry, won the championship maybe a month or two after he should have. And despite having the demeanor of a champion and a history of overdelivering in his role, the reign had the feeling like the company was never really behind him.

Unlike the ROH/TNA pedigree of Samoa Joe, or the years of build to MJF, or the CM Punk return, or the Hangman back-to-back big wins over industry legends, there was never a narrative the company put forth to prove why this guy is The Guy. He won title matches over well-known midcarders Claudio and Christian Cage. Roderick Strong, a talented wrestler but never really a main event guy on that level, was his third defense.

Swerve was putting in the promos and matches and storylines, but with Wembley on the horizon and the star of Will Ospreay rising, it felt more and more each day like he was just warming the belt for someone else…which is why his defense against Ospreay was so important. A big, decisive win over a top name at the right time, clean and clear in the middle of the ring, finally pulled Swerve out a chair at the big boy table.

By the time he went to Wembley, there was no question who the main event was. With Danielson uncharacteristically dropping the ball on the build, it was Swerve who carried it through, both in storyline and without.

12th Champion: Bryan Danielson – August 25th, 2024 (48 days)

Nearly five years in, the 12th champion, Bryan Danielson was crowned. On one hand, you wanted his name in your lineage of champions. You wanted the visual of him chanting “Yes” in front of a stadium crowd.

But on the other hand, he was clearly hurting, his heart didn’t seem in it, and the drama of “how long can he keep defending this belt” didn’t last long. A match with Jungle Boy. A match with Okada. And then it seemed destined that he would lose the belt to fellow Washington State guy, Darby Allin. Darby was beloved in the area, was coming off a victorious run with Sting, and the passing of the torch to the next generation of Pacific Northwest wrestlers seemed the obvious touch.

Instead, Darby foolishly gave up his shot to Jon Moxley in a bizarre storyline that they never bothered to make sense of. As with before, it felt like something in real life was warping the narrative fabric. Whatever the case may be, Jon Moxley found himself in the main event instead, strangling Danielson with a plastic bag that would set the tone for the year ahead.

© AEW

The Death Riders

13th Champion: Jon Moxley – October 12th, 2024 (4th reign, 273 days)

Getting his fourth reign before anyone other than Punk even had two, Jon Moxley and his Death Riders became a blanket over the whole promotion. They tried to pour chemicals in their opponent’s mouths. They strangled people with bags. Their matches were full of interference and shenanigans. Heroes would be fed to them over and over to illustrate the futility of fighting them.

Jon Moxley’s character waxed about how the AEW championship was meaningless. So he hid it in a briefcase so that no one could see it. By his reckoning, the title wasn’t important, the champion defending it was. In practice, until a hero could defeat him and heroically reveal the belt, no one would see it again.

The plan seemed to be that, eventually, Darby Allin would be back and take the title he should have rightfully won before. But Darby had a mountain to climb (literally Everest), and so Moxley was left fighting Orange Cassidy and Powerhouse Hobbs. Moxley also fought against Cope and Christian, but whatever the marquee value of those matches, it couldn’t help but feel like the spirit of AEW was all but lost.

Of all the patchwork fanbases that AEW had once held, none were left standing. The Elite were injured or sometimes lackeys. CM Punk and Cody Rhodes took their fanbases back to WWE. Hangman was evil and often off TV. Jericho had become persona non grata to a large section of the fans. All that was left was what seemed to be intentionally the most boring Moxley run in company history facing two ex-WWE guys in matches that lacked the Reseda Beach edge early AEW had.

Swerve’s return felt like a lightning bolt. Soon, we also saw Ospreay’s re-ascendence, and Hangman’s return to the heroic side of the ledger. Ospreay and Hangman’s rivalry to see who would face Moxley (yet again Ospreay was there to give someone that extra shove into the main event) and their eventual team-up formed the core of a new spirit, one that promised to face and defeat the Death Riders, one that promised to bring back the AEW we all knew and loved.

And live in Texas, in front of a stadium crowd, they did just that. The AEW Men’s World Championship was removed from its prison and revealed again to raucous celebration.

© AEW

14th Champion: ‘Hangman’ Adam Page – July 12th, 2025 (2nd reign, 133 days)

Finally fulfilling a promise to the fans, Adam Page won his second world championship with the defeat of the Death Riders in his signature Texas Death match. But from the beginning, the cracks were evident. His next match was against Jon Moxley again, somehow still having to fight the old battles once more.

His next major feud was against his forever-rival MJF, which, despite great promos and in-ring work by both performers, was plagued by questions of how the pseudo-‘Money In The Bank’ contract worked, whether MJF had to use it to get a shot or not, and whether he’d still keep it after he lost. From there, Hangman seemed set to start telling a new story, and chart a new path forward for the promotion.

But his matches were with upcoming talent and rehashes. We never got the Swerve match, the Ospreay match, or even the Jericho rematch from AEW’s earliest show. Instead they warmed up Samoa Joe again, and Hangman beat him decisively. Which led to another match with Samoa Joe strangely. And more strangely, the next one Samoa Joe won.

15th Champion: Samoa Joe – November 22, 2025 (2nd reign, 35 days)

Just like that, all the heat and build-up with the Death Riders, the year of darkness making way for the light, all that promise of a new era, poof.

In storyline, it seemed strange to build up a character as the hero leveraging the power of his friendships to overcome the bad guy faction’s overwhelming numbers, only to have him lose to another less-fearsome midcard bad guy faction’s overwhelming numbers while nobody showed up to help.

That Samoa Joe once more found himself unexpectedly holding the belt in a strange lull at the end of a calendar year seems a pattern worth noting, even if I don’t fully understand it. Yet he is a typically solid, sometimes stellar, personality and wrestler, and one could see how another Joe reign could once again help restore some glory to the belt. Instead, Samoa Joe lost in his second defense, in a match that echoed the three-way from his last run, and weirdly had Hangman and Swerve’s first encounter since their legendary feud but did not focus on it.

Weirder still, Samoa Joe did not lose it to either of them. He lost it to a returning MJF.

© AEW

The Modern Era

16th Champion: MJF – December 27th, 2025 (2nd Reign, 109 days)

Once more, MJF gained the championship while the belt was in a damaged position. Samoa Joe never showed great aura in his run. He never had the chance to, as he only defended the belt once, and even that was on “Dynamite” against a returning Eddie Kingston who wasn’t re-established yet. And Samoa Joe won the belt under strange circumstances in a storyline that didn’t make a lot of sense. MJF had his work cut out for him.

Looking back over the years, all the runs that feel like AEW “got behind” have lasted at least 180 days. Those reigns (Jericho, Moxley, Omega, Hangman, MJF, and Moxley again) define the top stars in the company. They wrestle big names, they get big wins, and they hold the belt for some time.

Despite a fun feud with Brody King, MJF’s first big win came nearly three months in against his old rival the Hangman, who was unable to keep up with MJF’s cheating ways. With the win, MJF both avenged his losses and for the second time ended someone’s ability to wrestle for the championship. The final visual of the match was one of the best in company history.

His next big match was against Kenny Omega, again defeating the hero, and again ending with an incredible closing shot. In the build-up, Kenny promised he would be ready for all of MJF’s tricks, but in the end, Kenny too fell victim to MJF’s cheating.

17th Champion: Darby Allin – April 15th, 2026 (39 days)

Not so for Darby Allin. MJF tried to cheat Darby only to have Darby cheat him right back, kicking off a breakneck reign that punched way out of its weight class. Darby’s reign is hard to reckon with. On the one hand, MJF was still the feature star. The whole thing feels more like a subset filler episode of MJF’s reign than it does a reign in its own right.

On the other hand, it produced incredible matches week in and week out. And the story, one where Darby does what Hangman and Kenny couldn’t by being willing to stoop to MJF’s level, is brilliant. Darby then ran around with a manic energy leaving an unforgettable title reign in his wake. Darby proved himself a main event talent at least in aura alone, and the next time he wins the world title, I’ll be glued to the screen to see how it goes.

Still, in the end, less than a Pay-Per-View cycle went by before Darby lost it back to MJF, whose reign continues where it left off.

18th Champion: MJF May 24th, 2026 (3rd reign, 45 days)

At long last, here we are. Wembley is on the horizon. MJF is our world champion. For how long? Who knows for sure. We do know that Will Ospreay will be in the main event, and if he wasn’t, it would feel like promotional malpractice. And after twice being part of a pivotal moment for previous champs (solidifying Swerve and setting up Hangman’s second run), it feels like time the Billy Goat finally gets to shine.

As for the AEW World Men’s Championship? It has had ups and downs. Right now, after the Darby reign and the excitement around it, it is back on an upswing. But as we look back, the big reigns have always had big matches against big names, big stories, and a long reign. The belt’s best moments are always part of well-planned stories and well-executed climaxes. Hopefully, whomever carries the belt out of Wembley, they have a good plan in place for the aftermath.

It is the belt of Jericho, of Moxley, of Omega, of Hangman, and of MJF. It has been held by the greats of previous eras such as CM Punk and Bryan Danielson and Samoa Joe. And as the reigns of Swerve and Darby show, it can also be a showcase to the future.

Whoever holds it the final moments of “All In”, in front of what will likely be their year’s biggest crowd, that person will be tasked with not just building the company forward, but building a legacy.