Wrestling on ITV and football were always closely linked: with broadcasting restrictions banning live coverage of domestic games on a Saturday afternoon (a policy which remains in force today), fans would tune in just before 4pm for half-time scores and at 4.45pm for the final results. Wrestling fitted between these two slots for 25 years and in later years football scores would be updated in the corner of the screen. The slot partially explains why wrestling had such a strong female following: many wives watched the show while their husbands attended live football matches.

In the World of Sport era, the FA Cup Final (a football/soccer match) was Britain's biggest annual sporting event and a close equivalent to the Superbowl in the US. As a standalone game at the end of the season it was (and is) a rare exception to the Saturday afternoon blackout. Wrestling would be bumped to early lunchtime, airing immediately before ITV's lengthy coverage of both the game and the pre-match build-up.

With the increased viewing audience, promoters soon began billing this as the biggest televised show of the year, often featuring the type of 'dream matches' traditionally reserved for live events. Throughout the 1960s (and in 1971) the show would air live, in most cases from Brent Town Hall, a London venue around a mile from Wembley Stadium, which hosted the Cup Final.

The two most famous Cup Final Day matches came in 1963 and 1965 with Jackie Pallo against Mick McManus, a battle of the two leading ring villains of the day. The legend, oft-repeated by the pair, was that the matches drew higher ratings than the Cup Final. While there are no specific figures available to confirm or deny this, it seems particularly unlikely.

In both of these years, the football match aired on both BBC and ITV. Indeed, in 1963 these were the only two channels broadcasting (BBC 2 launched in 1964), meaning we are asked to believe the wrestling, with opposing programming, actually drew more viewers than the most important match of the country's favourite sport airing unopposed. It's worth bearing in mind that the TV Times listing magazine reported an average of eight million for wrestling's regular Saturday afternoon slot that year, while audiences of 20 million or more were not uncommon for the Cup Final in that era.

There are two possible explanations for this 'statistic' (beyond it being pure fiction). The wrestling on ITV may well have drawn more viewers than BBC in the same slot (which was airing build-up to and analysis of the football). Alternatively, it's very conceivable that the wrestling outdrew ITV's own coverage of the football: this isn't as great an achievement as it might seem as BBC would reportedly outdraw ITV by anywhere between 2-1 and 5-1 on these head-to-head broadcasts.

While such stars as Bert Royal and Vic Faulkner, Billy Robinson, Adrian Street, George Kidd, Les Kellett and Kendo Nagasaki all appeared in the slot, McManus was the undisputed king of the Cup Final day broadcasts, appearing on 14 of the 15 broadcasts between 1963 and 1978 (there was no wrestling in 1976). At this point the mantle handed over to Big Daddy, whose tag matches aired on eight of the next nine shows. Perhaps the most bizarre pairing saw him team with Kwik Kick Lee, otherwise known as Akira Maeda; the Japanese grappler would, a couple of years later, popularise the 'shoot-style' UWF promotion after becoming dejected at the gimmickry and lack of legitimate skills he found in opponents on a WWF tour.

Although Joint Promotions lost its monopoly control of the wrestling TV contract at the end of 1986, it did provide the last Cup Final day broadcast the following year with a single match featuring Greg Valentine (Daddy's nephew rather than the US grappler) and a battle royale.