Prosiect Cymru and the delicate balances between Welsh and English club football

It's likely to be rejected, but the proposals for the Welsh League Cup highlight an ongoing anomaly within the English league system.

This morning in London, the Football Association of Wales (FAW) presented a case to key stakeholders in the English game which could change the relationship between clubs in the two countries permanently. The proposal seeks to invite the four Welsh clubs playing in the English league system to join a revamped Welsh League Cup competition with an easier route into European football being at stake.

The plan is called Prosiect Cymru, and the intention is for a new 16-team tournament featuring the four current Welsh EFL clubs—Cardiff City, Swansea City, Wrexham and Newport County—alongside twelve Cymru Premier clubs in a straight, single-leg knockout competition, with the main prize on offer being a place in the following year’s Europa Conference League qualifiers. This is, of course, the junior of the three European competitions but it could still be highly lucrative for whoever ended up taking part in it.

And this, of course, is the main sticking point. It is claimed that there is broad support for this new competition within Wales, but the situation isn’t quite the same in England. The FA are believed to be broadly in support of the proposals, and this is no great surprise. Birds of a feather usually stick together, in football administration circles. But they’re not the only ones with a say. Before anything gets passed it has to go before representatives of the EFL, and they’re a different kettle of fish altogether.

It is understood that there may be English clubs who are spitting feathers over this, and it’s not entirely unreasonable that they should be. It is considered that whoever has access to even the Europa Conference League would have a shortcut to revenue that would outstrip many other clubs in the EFL, thereby potentially giving one of these four clubs a huge financial advantage over the rest every season.

Welsh EFL clubs would be surrendering their right to qualify through English routes, which does rather beg the question of how such owners might feel in the event of finishing in a Europa or Champions League qualifying place which they’re unable to take up. Of course, that’s not an issue at present, but to rule out anything indefinitely in football can be a fool’s errand.

An attempted sweetener on this from the FAW, that this money would not be used in FFP or PSR calculations, appears to have fallen on deaf ears. After all, more money is more money, whether it’s listed on the balance sheet. It can still be spent and still provides greater security. Their argument that this should be considered in the spirit of togetherness of the Euro 2028 bid isn’t expected to receive a great deal more shrift from those who oppose it, either.

So, how much would this actually be worth to the winners? Well, because this is the distribution of money within professional football, the answer is somewhat byzantine, but we can give extremely rough estimates. Clubs would enter into the First Qualifying Round of the competition, and at that stage potential earnings may be limited to as little as €150,000 + €175,000 per qualifying round played.

But the big money starts to come into play should they negotiate their way through the three qualifying rounds and into the eight-match group stage. Qualification for this is worth in itself €3,170,000, but there’s an also €400,000 on offer per win and €133,000 per draw, as well as an extra €400,000 for finishing in the top eight in the 36-team enormo-group or €200,000 for finishing between 9th and 24th. Add on sponsorship, commercial deals and the revenue from four sell-out home matches and even a modest league campaign could see a club make €6m.

It is understandable that the owners of English clubs should be alarmed by a tiny number of clubs having relatively unfettered access to such money. Just the €3,170,000 for getting to the group stage alone is worth more than three times the television and solidarity money received by League Two clubs from the Premier League every season. Swansea and Cardiff might be able to make €1m per home match from various revenue sources on top of that prize money. It could easily be the equivalent to doubling their television money. These amounts are not insubstantial, below the Premier League.

Other complaints feel a little more tenuous. It has been claimed that these four clubs are seeking to “have their cake and eat it”, pointing at Swansea City entering the Europa League in 2013/14 after winning the EFL Cup, but this argument really fails on two points. Firstly, this is the only time that a Welsh club has qualified for Europe through the English route over the last thirty years.

And secondly, if they’re being self-serving (and yeah, they’re being self-serving), they’re only doing what practically any other club owner would be doing in the same situation. It’s also worth mentioning that Welsh clubs playing in England were quite happily allowed to take part in the European Cup Winners Cup until the mid-1990s through winning the Welsh Cup.

There is a case for saying that this could all even potentially backfire on these four clubs, because if anything the true anomaly here is that they play the EFL in the first place. On the whole, UEFA and FIFA might prefer for clubs to stay within their own jurisdictions (though they obviously consider it fine for, say, Italian clubs to play the Supercoppa Italiana entirely in Riyadh, so who knows), but although there are and always have been clubs who’ve played in other countries’ leagues, they remain the exception rather than the rule.

And as if all that isn’t enough, there does remain one Welsh club in the English non-league pyramid. Merthyr Town—the successor club to the aforementioned Merthyr Tydfil, who folded in 2010—are currently eight points clear at the top of the Southern League Premier Division South, but they’ve been excluded entirely from this equation. Why should they be the only Welsh club without recourse to a chance of qualification via this route?

This question is complicated by the fact that the FAW are currently offering Merthyr sweeteners to join the Welsh league system, up to £6m towards improving the infrastructure of the club's Penydarren Park. As Merthyr are fan-owned, they’re due to vote on the matter by the end of January. If they reject the offer, their exclusion from this competition might start to look extremely unfair. There seems little likelihood that the fans will vote in favour of the switch.

The circumstances regarding Wales are historically unique because the country had no professional league of its own until 1992. And when that league was finally founded, it came with inherent issues. The Football Association of Wales (FAW) allowed the three Football League clubs of the time—Newport County had folded in 1990 and reformed as a non-league club—to remain within the English league system.

But the number of Welsh clubs playing in the English system at the time was greater than the three League clubs alone. They were dotted about the English non-league pyramid, and when the League of Wales was announced and the FAW insisted that they switch to it, they were furious. Eight clubs nicknamed “The Irate Eight”—Bangor City, Barry Town, Caernarfon Town, Colwyn Bay, Merthyr Tydfil, Newport, Newtown and Rhyl—felt that they were being strong-armed into a League that they didn’t want anything to do with.

Bangor City, Newtown and Rhyl relented and agreed to join the Welsh football pyramid in time for the 1992/93 season, but the FAW issued the remaining five clubs—Newport, Colwyn Bay, Merthyr Tydfil, Barry Town and Caernarfon Town—with an ultimatum to either join the new league or be forced to leave Wales and play their home matches in England.

Initially, all five refused. Merthyr were permitted to continue in the English system because they were in the Football Conference at the time, but the other four decided to continue in England and take the matter to court. They won their case, but over time they did all end up joining the Welsh system regardless, with the final hold-outs Colwyn Bay eventually agreeing to join up as recently as 2019.

But that the EFL clubs were excluded from this in any significant way has rankled with some, over the years. Why, for example, is the idea of Celtic and Rangers joining the English system such anathema when there have been Welsh clubs in it for more than a century? Given that there’s four of them, why should these four clubs be allowed to take EFL places from English clubs? There are good answers to all of these questions, of course, but the very fact that they start to be asked at times like this is proof in itself that the clubs themselves might even be poking a hornet's nest by pushing for something like this.

There are other concerns over the clubs’ enthusiasm for this project. The football calendar is getting squeezed tighter and tighter. All four of the Welsh clubs playing in the EFL already play a 46-game League season with the possibility of three play-off matches, as well as the FA Cup, the EFL Cup and the EFL Trophy.

Adding Europa Conference League qualifiers would mean adding six (potentially eight, should they require a play-off) games starting in the middle of July to the schedule just to reach the group stage, and then a minimum of another eight games should they get that far. Oh, and you could be adding as many as another four in the Welsh League Cup, too. That’s a lot, and not just for the players. Fans will be expected to pack out these games and—albeit in a slightly different sense—that’s a lot, too.

And although it has their support, would it be benefitting the Cymru Premier clubs that much? It has been agreed that they can keep all gate receipts from matches in the revamped competition, but it still remains the case that they would be losing one of their European places after having lost one at the end of last season. Even improving the coefficient in this way would still only get them back to being one short of where they were until the end of last season.

The benefits to the FAW are obvious. They need to raise their UEFA coefficient which has dropped, leading to a reduction in the number of qualifying places available to Welsh clubs from four to three from the start of this season. And in addition to this, with vast gaps in funding for infrastructural programmes in comparison with the FA, they need to raise a lot of money if they’re to keep up. The FAW estimate that this could generate an additional £3m per season to support football at all levels throughout Wales.

But there are even theoretical risks to them over this, because as with anything related to the governance of football things can get factional and highly political very quickly. There are national associations who would definitely like to see a substantial reduction to the amount of control over the game held by the separate associations for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

The International Football Association Board (IFAB) sets the laws of the game. If offside sucks, it’s ultimately down to them. IFAB is made up of eight members, four from FIFA, and one from each of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. It’s a very powerful position to be in, and it’s long been considered anachronistic by many other nations that these four FAs should hold such positions between them. It’s a remote threat, but there would certainly be bristling among other FIFA members over such a close integration of two FAs with such a say in how the game is played on a global basis.

With so many moving parts, perhaps it isn’t that surprising that the EFL are expected to reject this proposal. As with any change, it’s potentially a very big one with consequences that could stray into the unintended. That might be a disappointment to the supporters of Cardiff, Swansea Wrexham and Newport hoping for Euro nights out in exotically-named Eastern European cities, but keeping these matters separate may well be the best insulation against being evetually forced into the Welsh league system altogether.

If Wales and England are to continue to be separate football nations, as surely everybody wants, then the cross-pollination that keeps Welsh clubs in the EFL (and in one case the Southern League) needs to continue to be the exception rather than the rule. It’s a delicate boat, the lengthy history of Welsh clubs playing their league football in England, and it might not take as much as some seem to believe for it to start rocking.

This file—The Racecourse Ground in Wrexham by Steve Daniels—is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.