10 Best Wrestling Match Concepts Since 2000
4. Money In The Bank
It revitalized the ladder match. A match so popular it’s spawned its own successful pay per view for the last 10 years.
The rules being: instead of a championship title hanging 20 feet above the ring like most ladder matches, a briefcase is suspended above. 5–10 participants then compete for the briefcase that contains a contract for a world championship match at any time the following calendar year by scaling a ladder and retrieving. It first debuted at WrestleMania 21 with Edge scoring the win over Chris Benoit, Chris Jericho, Christian, Kane, and Shelton Benjamin in a breathtaking collision that featured 5 talents that had already or would go onto win world titles in their careers.
After Edge cashed in on a vulnerable John Cena at New Year's Revolution (2006) it set the tone that MITB matches were must-see attractions for fans. Only 4/23 cash-ins of the briefcase have ended up being unsuccessful. The briefcase did so much for the careers of MITB winners Edge, Rob Van Dam, CM Punk, Seth Rollins and Daniel Bryan in later years.
On Talk is Jericho, Jericho revealed how the Money In The Bank was first conceived:
“So I came up with the idea to do a match, like a ladder match. A six-way ladder match. And Brian Gewirtz, who was a good writer at the time said, ‘well what’s at stake?’ So I said, ‘well why don’t you have a contract where the winner gets a title shot the next night?’ Then Brian said, ‘Well, why don’t you make it you can use it any time over the following year and you can cash it in at any time?’ And so we took that to Vince and Vince agreed, loved the idea. His only concession was that the contract had to be in a briefcase. Knowing how Vince is, maybe he wanted the people to see it rather than just a piece of paper hanging there. Like some kind of an actual trophy. And maybe he thought the briefcase was something you could actually carry and use. So it was a really cool kind of a three-way invention of this match because even though Vince’s little thing was just the briefcase, the briefcase has become synonymous with the show."