The Daily, 18th July 2023
If you're not angry at the FA over what they're doing to the Cup, you should be.
Are they in… a hurry to do this? Why was there no consultation and practically no public comment on the matter? Why are the FA on the point of abdicating responsibility of the world’s oldest football cup competittion to an organisation which has proved itself again and again to be actively hostile to its very existence for an entire decade, and what the hell sort of condition do they expect it to be in by the time they get it back?
It has been known for a couple of weeks that something was afoot. Almost two weeks ago the Mirror was reporting that “The FA Cup could be set for huge changes that will impact teams up and down the pyramid”, and it is now being reported that international rights agencies IMG, Pitch International and Infront have opted not to submit a tender for what they regarded as an auction they couldn’t win after it became clear that a late offer received by the FA from Premier League—which led to the FA reopening the tender after having already decided a preferred bidder—contained compensation for the abolition of FA Cup replays and additional funding for the grassroots game.
It has been reported that under the new proposals replays would be scrapped completely—it is not clear why the Premier League should be bothered about anything happens prior to the Third Round of the competition—and that what has been decribed as the “early” rounds (with the FA Cup, how you define that particularly word is highly elastic) will have to move to midweek fixture dates, with the final being moved to the Saturday before the last weekend of the Premier League season.
And we probably shouldn’t even be surprised this, in some respects. In the early 1990s, when the First Division clubs of the Football League decided that they didn’t want to share revenues with other clubs any more, they could only get their land grab moving with the permission and approval of the Football Association. The FA, beholden to a war with the Football League which was all about the degrees of their control rather than the wellness or betterment of the game in this country, decided to stick the knife into the League and approve the Premier League.
But you do have to ask… have they given any thought whatsoever to the optics of this? The FA Cup, that final shred of ‘romance’ that this otherwise rapacious game has to offer, is to be completely reshaped for the benefits of the small number of biggest clubs. Midweek fixtures will only accelerate its decline, but managed decline is all the rage, nowadays. Smaller attendances and a lack of replays will hit the non-league game hard.
It remains as difficult as ever to even define what is meant in this context by “grassroots”, since it can be interpreted as anything from the lower reaches of the men’s non-league game to park pitches, but it does look an awful lot like non-league football will pay the cost for increased funding to grassroots rather than wealthier clubs. Surely that’s the only logical conclusion that can be reached from the way in which this is all being done.
You find yourself wondering what on earth could be going on inside their tiny minds. At a time when the regulation of the game is under scrutiny like never before, with an independent regulator set to be written into law, why is the FA ceding regulation of its own cup competition to the Premier League? Because if they’re concerned that lower league clubs are claiming them to have effectively taken a Premier League bribe, then they should be, because that’s exactly what it looks like.
It also make it look very much as though they only see themselves as managers of the England national teams. If that is the case, then let that be the case. Let the new independent regulator sweep away all other governance from the FA, and if FIFA make objection to that, then perhaps the FA can explain to them why they don’t appear to want to givern any more. Because if the FA can’t be bothered with the FA Cup any more, then perhaps it is time to give it to someone else, someone who cares about it a bit more. The biggest problem here is that they seem set to give control over to it to one of the few bodies who cares about it even less than they seem to.
That regulator can't come quick enough, pretty much criminal to give away a competition they're meant to govern, but then they don't govern the rest of the game in England either.