The FA Cup has been sold to the soulless Premier League
The FA Cup has been sold to the soulless Premier League
It’s not about the replays. You know that, right?
The very first issue of this newsletter was about the FA Cup.
It put forward a load of guff about how the Cup is great, but the main thrust of the thing was that the tournament’s early stages are long forgotten by the time the Third Round comes about, and thus are underappreciated.
Last week we got even more confirmation of why that might be. Everyone and their mums has written about the FA Cup in the last seven days but it’s a subject about which I feel strongly.
So, with the benefit of a few days’ remove, here’s my view.
The FA Cup has been sold to the soulless Premier League
There was an immediate sense that they’d buried the headline. When the Football Association announced changes to the FA Cup – sorry, the Emirates FA Cup – from 2024/25, it did so in the form of a lengthy statement that was quickly parsed and roundly criticised.
The abolition of replays in the competition proper was deemed by many to be the most significant development and it was wrapped up in enough additional detail to give the statement a whiff of attempted deception.
Were it not for the logo at the top, one might have thought the announcement had come from the Premier League. Maybe it had.
“Separately, the Premier League has increased funding to the football pyramid, providing up to an additional £33 million for grassroots football on top of the £100 million it currently gives to good causes each season,” parped the statement purportedly from a body other than the Premier League.
That additional £33 million has bought a handful of changes to the FA Cup. All rounds will now be played at the weekend, except on Wednesdays when they get rudely awakened by the dustmen.
Those weekends, up to and including Wednesday for some unfathomable reason, in the case of the Fourth Round, will not clash with Premier League weekends from the Third Round until the Quarter-Finals.
The FA Cup Final will be played on the penultimate weekend of the Premier League season; that there will be no Friday or Saturday games in the top flight is scant compensation for making the league finale the last day of the English professional season.
That shift is significant and symbolic. It’s also cosmetic. The reaction to it has been muted, indicative perhaps of the fact that the dissent is rooted in authentic concern about tangible implications. Scrapping replays from the First Round Proper has tangible implications and the FA was robustly reminded of them.
It wasn’t long before it was confirmed that the EFL and National League had not been consulted. In the words of the EFL, the changes had been agreed entirely between the FA and the Premier League. The National League’s later backing does not alter that fact.
A barrage of statements from football clubs of most shapes and sizes followed. Tranmere Rovers were among the first and vice-chair Nicola Palios has been characteristically vocal and forthright on her own socials too.
Grimsby Town and Exeter City went early too, and they know what they’re talking about. Between their two condemnations, the clubs outlined the sentimental and financial importance of replays against so-called bigger clubs. Exeter in particular were essentially saved by a draw against Manchester United not so many moons ago.
The Mariners also voiced their support for the introduction of the independent football regulator, and that’s important. The dynamics behind these changes to the FA Cup boil down to the Premier League being able to overstep its remit because of its wealth and the FA seems only too willing to bend.
In other words, a small number of clubs can do as they please, even if that doesn’t match the lived experience of the supporters of some of those clubs from one weekend to the next. That is not a sustainable situation for the whole game, nor is it ethically acceptable.
The slew of club statements continued. Farnborough, beneficiaries of replay money, had their say. Kettering Town leveraged their position as the FA Cup’s highest scoring team to object. The dissent from clubs grew until it was pretty clearly just a bunch of non-league clubs farting out statements because everyone else had, but their substance was consistent and just.
Full of perfect truths, they are not. Replays against the top clubs, especially away from home, are big historical occasions for FA Cup participants lower down the pyramid. Sometimes they amount to salvation. But they’re not guaranteed and they can’t be planned around, so are they really the answer to anything from a financial perspective?
Replays don’t really happen elsewhere. They are one of English football’s beautiful imperfections, born of a football culture that was comfortable settling League Cup finals with multiple replays only half a century ago. The FA Cup Final itself was won in a replay as recently as 1993. English football is weird, replays are one of its great oddities.
There is little rational justification for replays, but so what? Are we so joyless that we can’t handle things that are fun and silly and traditional just because?
FA Cup replays aren’t really the issue at hand. We’ll have them or we won’t. Clubs need to plan for not having them; they should be already. What actually matters in the grand scheme of things is the apparent total lack of consultation.
When these kinds of developments in football it always leads to suggestions that the people complaining just don’t like change, that traditionalists are digging their heels in for the sake of it. That’s not it. The grievance is that vast swathes of the game have no voice in matters that affect them and the interests of a handful of clubs are nakedly favoured.
In a competition that was entered by 729 clubs in 2023/24, that simply isn’t good enough. Worse still, the implication is that the Premier League’s riches enable it to manipulate the sport’s governing body like a puppeteer, offering the trickle-down money it frankly owes the rest of football anyway in exchange for control it shouldn’t have.
It’s difficult to predict what will happen next. Some form of protest from clubs is likely, but the only meaningful lever they have to pull is to withdraw from the competition.
That’s not going to happen – the whole point is that the clubs beneath the Premier League rely upon and care about the FA Cup. Clubs would have to pull out en masse. Historical examples of such unity are vanishingly rare.
“The Emirates FA Cup is our biggest asset,” says FA chief executive Mark Bullingham. This is the oldest cup competition in the world. It predates the Football League, never mind the Premier League. Amendments to it have implications that strike at the very heart of the English game.
The question that must be asked isn’t whether replays should be scrapped but, yet again, what the hell Football Association is playing at. Letting the Premier League steer the ship is a gross dereliction of its guardianship of the game. Once more for you at the back: the Premier League is not and cannot be in charge of English football. It has no right to buy influence.
It’s driven, they say, by the expansion of UEFA’s club competitions. There’s honestly no polite response to that. Tranmere and Grimsby and Farnborough and Kettering and Exeter don’t care, nor should they.
What the Premier League fails to understand is that these five clubs and 704 others are just as important as the big boys. That should be the singular truth guiding the FA.
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“This FA Cup run will be spoken about in Coventry City circles for a long, long time. We cannot be too down about it.”
Mark Robins was remarkably circumspect after Coventry City’s FA Cup Semi-Final defeat against Manchester United on penalties on Sunday.
Coventry is my adopted home. I’m fiercely proud of it, and I have a great deal of time for the club the Sky Blues have become under Robins in his second spell in charge. I’ll be hearing about that game until the day I die. I’m sure of that.
To go three goals down against United at Wembley and take them all the way to penalties was amazing. Their disallowed goal in extra time stoppage time was a travesty. That can’t be offside. It’s just nonsense. How have we allowed this to happen?
Salty beef extracts
Calls for Championship VAR set impossible ideal that will never be achieved (We Are Terriers) - £
115 reasons why Man City’s dominance is a disaster for the Premier League (i)
Forest will pay the price for making fans feel taunted over 24% ticket hikes (i)
Victor Torp’s torment: the greatest ever FA Cup moment that wasn’t (The Guardian)
The FA and the Premier League join forces to desecrate the FA Cup (Unexpected Delirium)
Shine on you crazy Diamond Lights (Unexpected Delirium)
The infantilisation of football content has to stop (Game Within The Game)
Fear and loathing in Ajinomoto (The Hachi)
Dessert
Another week, another adidas Predator. I’ll stop when they do. (Please don’t.)
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