Leeds United 1 Arsenal 0 
 
The game was contested between cup holders Arsenal, who had won the Football League and the FA Cup the previous season, and Leeds United, who had won the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup and finished second in the league the previous season, but had never won the FA Cup. Arsenal and Leeds became the first clubs to have faced one another in both English domestic cup finals: the two had previously contested the 1968 Football League Cup Final, which Leeds had won, 1–0.  Arsenal planned to make it the third successive decade for a club to return as Cup-holders and win for a second successive year, as Newcastle United had done in 1952 and Tottenham Hotspur in 1962.