The NWA World title basically gave birth to pretty much every major world title in history.
The WWE title was created when the Capitol Wrestling Corporation, now known as WWE, parted ways with the NWA after they disputed that their guy Buddy Rogers… shouldn’t have lost the NWA title to Lou Thesz. In those days titles would only change hands in best of three falls matches and the match was just one fall.
One fall!
The WWE then just gave Rogers a new belt, and lied that he’d won a tournament for it. Essentially, they just said he was still champion.
The WCW World Title was born from the NWA title after Ric Flair left WCW and took the big gold belt with him. When Lex Luger then defeated Barry Windham to be the new champion, it was called the WCW World title, but WCW continued to recognise the title history of the NWA up to that point as the history of the WCW World title.
They later got the big gold belt back and first recognised it as the NWA title, but when WCW fell out with NWA, it was renamed the belt the WCW International World Heavyweight Championship,before unifying it with the WCW World title and just using the physical nig gold belt that had been the NWA title.
Shane Douglas won the NWA World title and threw it down and declared that he was the ECW World Champion, thereby taking the world title status of the NWA title to legitimise the ECW belt.
TNA used the NWA World title as its world title for a few years before parting ways with the NWA and just crowning a new TNA World Championship…which obviously continued as the top belt replacing the NWA World title.
As for the AEW World Title? Well even though the championship seemingly has no link to the NWA world title, it’s worth noting that the first show that would be the genesis of AEW,
All In 2018, had Cody Rhodes defeat Nick Aldis for the NWA World Championship…so even AEW’s first world title change was the NWA Title.
Oh, and both the current WWE World Heavyweight Championship and the previous WWE world Heavyweight Championship are modelled after the big gold belt formally known as the NWA World Championship.
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