Global InformationList of professional wrestling attendance records in the United Kingdom information
The following is a list of professional wrestling attendance records in the United Kingdom. All Elite Wrestling holds the record for the largest wrestling crowd in the UK with an attendance of 81,035 for All In on August 27, 2023.
In its heyday, British-based Joint Promotions and its independent rivals generally relied on intensive touring rather than major individual shows - by the mid 1960s Joint had an annual touring schedule of between 4000 and 5000 house shows including weekly residencies in over thirty cities.[1] However, Joint regularly appeared at the Royal Albert Hall in London (capacity 5,272)[2] and organised three major shows at Wembley Arena between 1979 and 1981 at the height of top star Big Daddy's popularity. Both venues would later host WWF and WCW shows.
The mainstream popularity of British wrestling largely declined after the cancellation of ITV's World of Sport in 1985 and then the standalone Wrestling programme on the network in 1988. (A programme continued on regional Welsh language terrestrial channel S4C until 1995.) Joint Promotions closed down in February 1995, although rival All Star Wrestling, which supplanted Joint as dominant local promotion in the late 1980s after taking over a share of the final two years of ITV coverage, survives at grassroots level as of 2024.
As a result, all of the attendance records formerly set by British wrestling promotions were gradually surpassed in the years following the WWF's arrival in the UK. The WWF's official UK debut took place on October 10, 1989, at the sold-out London Arena in London, England. The main event was a match between Hulk Hogan (with Miss Elizabeth) and Randy Savage (with Sensational Sherri) for the WWF World Heavyweight Championship. The event was broadcast live on Sky One. A similar show was held the next night in Birmingham.[3]
This was followed by a series of high profile UK tours, starting with the 1991 UK Rampage. By August 1992 this had culimated in the WWF holding Summerslam '92 at Wembley Stadium before nearly 80,000 fans - a live event on a scale precedented within the worldwide wrestling industry only by 1987's Wrestlemania III. WCW meanwhile, with WCW Worldwide in a graveyard slot on ITV, conducted an exploratory tour in December 1991. Fuller tours were conducted in 1993-1994 by which time ITV had moved WCW to British wrestling's old Saturday afternoon timeslot. These ceased once the company moved to pan-European satellite channel Superchannel in late 1995 but resumed after the move back to terrestrial television on Channel 5 in 1999, with two more tours in 2000 before the company closed in 2001.
A series of live and PPV events, Mayhem in Manchester (1998), No Mercy (1999), Rebellion (1999-2002), Insurrextion (2000-2003), were created exclusively for the British market. WWE ended all-UK exclusive pay-per-views when its weekly programming began broadcasting on British television in 2004. According to this list, 13 events are from WWE's flagship television show WWE Raw and 5 from WWE Smackdown, which since 2005's has been held exclusively in stadiums that typically have a seating capacity of at least 20,000 people or more. Only two of the attendances listed are non-WWE events, AEW's 2023 Wembley Stadaium show All In and a house show during WCW Nitro U.K. Tour 2000! which is the last remaining record set by the company. All bar one of these events have been held in England, most often in the metropolitan areas of either Manchester or the capital city of London, the exception being 2022 Cardiff, Wales WWE event Clash at the Castle. On November 15, 2015, an Insane Championship Wrestling show in Glasgow, Scotland, headlined by Grado vs. Drew Galloway, drew a sellout crowd of 3,802 fans and a $152,780 gate. It was the biggest crowd for a British-based promotion since 1982 and the largest UK gate of the "modern-era".[4]
- ^ Lister, John. "The History of British Wrestling". House of Deception.
By the mid 1960s, Joint had doubled their live event schedule to somewhere in the region of 4,000 to 5,000 shows a year. Every town of note had a show at least once a month, and at some points more than 30 cities had a weekly date. For live events per square mile, Mexico City and perhaps Tokyo are perhaps the only areas to rival this spell of business, and it is doubtful that any territory worldwide has ever seen so many shows putting gate receipts in the pockets of so few promoters.
- ^ Colson, Thomas. "A 12-seat Grand Tier box at the Royal Albert Hall is on sale for £2.5 million". Business Insider. Retrieved 24 October 2019.
- ^ Cawthon, Graham. "Yearly Results: 1989". TheHistoryOfWWE.com.
- ^ Meltzer, Dave (November 23, 2015). "Holm defeats Rousey, Nick Bockwinkel passes away, more". Wrestling Observer Newsletter. Campbell, California.
The Insane Championship Wrestling show on 11/15 at the SECC in Glasgow, Scotland, drew a sellout of 4,000 fans, which as noted, was the biggest crowd for a U.K. based promotion since 1982. ICW has been packing 1,500 seat buildings regularly, particularly after a BBC piece made a cult hero out of Grado.