10 Best WWE Pay-Per-Views Of The Past Decade
Goal Of The Month
NXT's transformative impact on WWE has extended beyond the quality of graduates making the leap from Full Sail to the company's main roster.
The weekly rank-and-file are now as good as they've ever been thanks to the raised quality bar across the board, but the strip-mined lower league rarely feels left behind. TakeOver shows are routinely the standout events from supershow weekends, with various entries from Brooklyn, Dallas, Chicago and Philadelphia rivalling WWE's best cards ever - let alone the ones unlucky enough to follow them the next night.
Held to a different standard, WWE pay-per-views are such huge affairs that they can't even compare with the NXT extravaganzas on run-time, let alone match quality. Braun Strowman had only just registered the first fall in February 2018's Elimination Chamber headliner when it passed the three hour mark. 22 more main event minutes still remained following a card that only had four other matches to fill the time earlier in the night. And that's only analysis of a single show.
The pay-per-view landscape's become substantially more problematic since the advent of the WWE Network. With no shackles of old, the super-service model has attacked viewers' watches rather than wallets. The jury's out on which one's worse, but little has really changed despite Vince McMahon's previous declaration of the medium's death. Fans will donate their time and cash if the product's actually any good.
10. Money In The Bank 2011
Time's been a little unkind to both the pay-per-view and the match in which CM Punk iconically collapsed Vince McMahon's house of cards with a blown kiss. The company's miserable mishandling of the moment in the aftermath did much to deflate the tension the 'Voice Of The Voiceless' created with his legendary Las Vegas 'Pipe Bomb'. In a bottle (something Punk's ironically kept his hands off over the years), the show still has some magic.
Punk and John Cena had marginally better matches as the years progressed, but few benefited from their chemistry quite as much as the Chicagoans live at Money In The Bank. A white hot atmosphere buoyed the battle from something potentially pedestrian into positively pulsating. Punk's victory and departure with the WWE Title was at very least the majestic scene the evocative angle had promised.
Elsewhere on an otherwise forgotten show, Alberto Del Rio won a Money In The Bank ladder match in which he was by far the least interesting proponent, Daniel Bryan surprisingly won another in which he was, and Randy Orton and Christian continued their astonishingly entertaining feud with another exceptional and understated pay-per-view gem.