By Dr Colm Hickey
Not every football fan I know loves the Premier League. Many are not that interested as the same teams dominate it. Its power and close association with TV companies means that many matches are scheduled at impossible times for travelling fans to get to during the week. We deplore the cynicism of overseas owners who are only interested in making money and the lack of meaningful engagement with fans. The rumours of a European Super League that will not go away. An expanded UEFA Champions League which will see more meaningless games on TV. All these smack of a sense of a game that has clearly lost its way. Yet every fan I know loves the FA Cup. I am sure you do too.
Most fans can take or leave the Premier League. While we would like our team to play in it, we know that it is an improbable dream. There are seventy-two teams in the English Football League. Here is football reality. Clubs yoyo up and down. A couple of mediocre seasons, perhaps a relegation and then, maybe, a bounce back with a promotion. That is our reality. What most of us think at the beginning of the season is this. On day one, as we go to the first game of the season, in the last few days of August or early September, you will hear someone saying, ‘You know? I think that this could be our year.’ You smile and might even laugh out loud and retort: ‘Don’t be silly’, but deep down in your secret child mind, you have a thrill of anticipation, and you think to yourself, ‘You know, he just might be right.’ However, this excitement often only lasts 90 minutes as your team stumbles to an opening day defeat, and as you go back to the station you hear someone say: ‘I’m telling you, we are rubbish’, and deep down in your secret child mind you know the terrible truth that probably this will not be your team’s year after all. What is there to look forward to? The League Cup perhaps, but the big one, the best one, without question is the FA Cup. You can be having a bad season with no hope of promotion, but a couple of wins in the Cup and you are on the glory road to Wembley.
Why is the FA Cup so revered by most fans and most clubs? After all, it is a competition that very few clubs will ever win. The total number of entries in the FA Cup has changed over time with 748 entering in season 2023–24. Predictably, the competition winners are dominated by what is often referred to as the Premier League’s ‘big six’. Arsenal has the most wins with fourteen followed by Manchester United with twelve. Chelsea, Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur have won the Cup eight times and Manchester City seven. All in all, that is fifty-seven victories. This means that there are ninety-six years when one of the big six did not win the Cup. Who are they? I know you do not know. You could name a few. You certainly will know if your team won the cup as I do mine, (Charlton Athletic beating Burnley 1-0 in 1947 since you are asking), but not them all. Some early winners included the Wanderers, a public-school team, in 1872, Old Etonians, in 1875 the Royal Engineers in1872 and Oxford United in 1874. Blackburn Olympic, not to be confused with Blackburn Rovers caused a sensation when it won the Cup in 1885 as it was the first professional team to do so beating Old Etonians and ending the days of amateur winners. Bury has won it twice. The club’s nickname is ‘The Shakers’ as their 6-0 victory over Derby County shook the football world.
In total fifty-seven clubs have appeared in the final and forty-four have won it since it was first contested in 1872. So, realistically, if you do not support one of the big six, the chances are that your club is unlikely to win it, although if you do, you have an excellent chance of doing so. Indeed, since the foundation of the Premier League in 1992, only four teams outside the top six-Everton in 1995, Portsmouth in 2008, Wigan in 2013 and Leicester in 202-have won the cup. For most of us, it is becoming an almost impossible trophy to win.
Did the 748 teams which entered the FA Cup know that their chances of winning it were almost zero? Of course they did. I am a member of the committee of Hanwell Town in the London borough of Ealing. We enter every year, but we have never made even the First Round proper. Two years ago, we played Cray Valley Paper Mills. They are a league below us, and we won easily 3-1. We almost made it to the holy grail of a money spinning First Round draw but just failed. This year we were knocked out in the First Qualifying Round (there are four to win before the First round proper). For Cray Valley things were much better and it, unbelievably, made the First Round Proper where it was drawn away to guess who? Charlton Athletic. The match was chosen by the BBC so the club got more money and, in a match which Charlton should have won easily, outplayed the League One team and earned a draw. The replay was held at its tiny ground in nearby Eltham and was again televised live. In a spirited performance, the club lost but pocked over £100,000 from the cup run having played eight matches in all.
This kind of money is a lottery win for non-league clubs. Its two matches against Charlton, its local neighbour, (the clubs are about two miles apart) will form part of its history. The money will help fund ground improvements and provide the manager with more funds to strengthen the club. It puts the club on the map and will attract more supporters. What is not to like? Cray Valley Paper Mills did not enter the competition thinking it would win the Cup. Of course not. What it hoped for and what it got, was what a few non-league clubs get every year, a shot at glory. That is what the game is all about. That is what we, most fans realise, appreciate and cherish. The game is about glory. It is about dreams. It is about community.
So, in its wisdom what does the FA do to its most cherished competition, arguably the greatest national cup knock out competition in the world? Does it cherish it or besmirch it? You know the answer. Rather than adopting a policy of, ‘If it’s not broken, don’t fix it’, it has blundered into a case of, ‘This isn’t broken so we will break it.’ It decided, in consultation with the Premier League, to scrap replays in the FA Cup from the First Round from 2024 season because of the expansion of European competitions next season. The move was widely criticised, with more than 100 clubs sharing statements voicing their position against the move. The Football Association insisted ‘all parties accepted’ the change. It said: ‘We have been discussing the calendar for the 2024-25 season with the Premier League and EFL for well over a year. …The discussions then focused on how to make all our competitions stronger, despite having fewer dates available and wanting to maintain player welfare. we have also increased the number of Emirates FA Cup matches that will be broadcast in the early rounds, which will lead to additional guaranteed broadcast revenue for EFL and National League teams. Additionally, we review the prize money annually for the competition.’ In response, Notts County issued a statement:‘As the world’s oldest professional football club, and past winners of the FA Cup, we’re very sad to see that English football is set to lose a part of its soul.’
What about the famous ‘big six’-what did they say? Unsurprisingly they were in favour of the move. The Manchester United manager Erik ten Hag said while it is ‘very sad for the British football culture’, the outcome was ‘inevitable’. The Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta claimed his responsibility is to ‘protect our players’. ‘In the last two seasons, they have played with no breaks, it’s not healthy,’ Arteta said. Manchester City boss, Pep Guardiola, agreed the changes are a ‘problem’ for lower-division clubs, and acknowledged it was ‘much better’ for teams playing in European competitions. ‘I understand why clubs in lower divisions complain and it has been a tradition for many years, but with the schedule that we have playing in European competition and with many players going to the national team, it is much better,’ Guardiola said.
So, there you have it. The moves will be better for the national team. It will be better for teams playing in Europe. More games will be televised, and player health and safety will be enhanced. My friend, if you believe that you will believe anything.
Who benefits from this move? The Hanwell Towns, the Cray Valley Paper Mills, the Charlton Athletics, the lower league EFL clubs? Strangely no. What about the big six? Do they benefit? Strangely yes. They will not have the inconvenience of replays. They can get fresher for their European games and their international players will get rested. Will they? An Expanded European competition will result in more, not fewer games. Premier league clubs have huge squads. Many Premier League clubs already rest their entire first XI in FA Cup matches further reducing its appeal. If games are televised on TV, will they be on free to air? Some will be, but others will be on satellite TV for which fans will have to have a subscription to view. The prize money may very well increase but you should not use money as the barometer of happiness.
Three Irishmen sum up the situation. First, the great Spurs legend, Danny Blanchflower, who said: ‘The great fallacy is that the game is first and last about winning. It is nothing of the kind. The game is about glory, it is about doing things in style and with a flourish, about going out and beating the other lot, not waiting for them to die of boredom.’ Second, the poet W. B. Yeats: ‘But I, being poor, have only my dreams/ I have spread my dreams under your feet/Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.’ Third, the great band, The Saw Doctors: ‘To win just once/To win just once/ To win just once/That would be enough.’
Oh, you can laugh at us, the fans of the little clubs, the volunteers who give up their time for a genuine love of the game who turn up week in and week out who are the labourers of the very pyramids that you, the footballing Pharaohs demand, we toil for year after year with little reward or recognition so you can have gilded monuments to your achievements. But never forget that the pyramids still stand proud and defiant in the Egyptian desert. Yet can you name three Pharaohs? Will the FA end up ruining its own competition? Will it be like the poem ‘Ozymandias’ by Percy Shelley: ‘Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!/ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay/Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare/The lone and level sands stretch far away.’? If it goes on like this, it might be.
Picture: Wikimedia Commons