The FA and the Premier League join forces to desecrate the FA Cup

It's one thing to visualise a dystopian future for professional football. It's another to see this dystopia evidently being rushed through before your very eyes.

Were it to be a scene from a drama series it would probably be rejected as too clunky, but this isn't a drama series and yes, the allegory is almost too on the nose. The FA Cup is losing its replays while consecrating its inferior status to the Premier League because the Premier League is demanding more space in its calendar for its expanded European competitions.

Not only that, but this little stitch-up came in the same week that three of the remaining four English clubs in European tournaments were knocked of them, including both in the Champions League, all of which hints that rumours of English dominance over this competition may have been somewhat overstated, but also in the same week that FIFA effectively surrendered its opposition to matches being played at the behest of anyone, at any time.

It's one thing to visualise a dystopian future for professional football. It's another to see this dystopia evidently being rushed through before your every eyes because those with all the power are so plainly terrified of anyone independent and try to take control of the wild west way in which this has all been run for the last few decades.

These state actors, with reputations that need washing. These plutocrats who see association football as just another to be exploited rather than a phenomenon of greater social and cultural importance than they could ever imagine. They didn’t get involved in this to have someone spying on what they were doing.

It bears repeating that nobody involved in any of this is stupid. None of those involved in this carve-up are sitting around a large oak table, shirts on backwards yet still somehow buttoned up, throwing darts at a Dartboard of Evil and hitting the FA Cup bullseye.

This is the plan, to a great extent. It’s just been hurried along because there appears to be a shadowy cabal of people who seem to think that the whole game matters rather than just their gilded palaces of sin. The biggest mistake that those opposing this could make would be to start believing that they care, but lack understanding.

It is absolutely staggering that the EFL, half of whose membership joins the FA Cup a full two rounds before any of the Premier League, weren’t consulted over this. It is disappointing but considerably less surprising to establish that the non-league game wasn’t. But perhaps most surprisingly of all, the fact that the FA Council—the body which is supposed to bestow a veneer of custodianship on what is essentially just another commercial organisation—was left out of the equation as well.

We know that they are not so stupid as to not be fully aware of the extent to which this would bring about precisely the sort of response that it has. Club statements have been issued, dripping with fury. The EFL itself’s statement left little question that, for all the restraint of the language used, they believed themselves to have been stitched up.

We also know they’re fully cognisant of the rank hypocrisy of jetting to the other side of the world for lucrative friendly matches, including tours which can take up the entire pre-season, and then complaining about too many domestic cup matches. All of this has been factored in. Perhaps the only question of relevance at this stage is whether how stupid they think we are.

And some of the decisions taken frankly beggar belief. Why cancel for replays in the First and Second rounds, when Premier League clubs don’t even take part in those? An FA Cup Second Round match with a Third Round match away to Manchester United will be worth more than £1m in television money, gate receipt-sharing and other commercial opportunities, and for a non-league club that might well be the catalyst for a vastly different future, whether through being able to afford better players, infrastructural redevelopment, or even staving off extinction-threatening debts.

Some—mostly, from a cursory glance, fans of Premier League clubs—have argued that smaller clubs shouldn’t be ‘relying’ on such windfalls, to which the obvious answer is… we know! But on a club-by-club basis, the overwhelming truth is that no, clubs don’t ‘rely’ on getting to the Third Round of the FA Cup to balance their books. Exeter City did in 2005. It saved the club. But it wasn’t their plan. It’s just that the alternative might have been oblivion. Correlation does not always equal causation.

The fact of the matter is that these sorts of windfalls are some of the few forms of financial distribution towards the lower leagues and the non-league game that are left standing, with safeguards that were designed to give everybody some degree of a chance having been systematically stripped away for literally decades.

Trickle Down economic theory is widely discredited for this very reason. The most significant trickling down of anything within English football over the last forty years—because this started at least a full decade before the Premier League was hatched in David Dein’s money laboratory—has been wage hyper-inflation. As top flight club’s saw their earnings go astronomical at the same time as the Bosman ruling, so they could afford to spend big on wages, and this led to clubs lower down the ladder having to run increasingly quickly just to stand still.

We all know that the majority of Championship clubs are spending more money on wages alone than they are bringing in from all sources combined because they have to. We’ve all seen clubs collapse into administration as a combination of this increasingly desperate and financially-reckless-by-necessity chase to keep up.

When incompetence and malignance collide, the results can be horrific. We all saw Bury die. And these aren’t just the complaints of small clubs either. Some huge institutions have sailed close to some strong winds over the last forty-odd years; Chelsea, Manchester City, Everton, Spurs, Nottingham Forest and Leeds United, to name just a few. You reach a point at which you can only realistically ask whether you can support this entire edifice.

What is most striking about this week’s desecration of the FA Cup is how callous it was, to a point of looking almost sadistic. There was no consultation, which told us everything we need to know about whose opinions all concerned believe matter. FA Cup First and Second round replays were sacrificed for no reason that seems particularly clear. If clubs or supporters chose to boycott next season’s FA Cup, that would be entirely understandable. We certainly don’t matter to them.

There’s a case for saying that the FA are being pushed towards this by forces greater than they, that this brave new union of FIFA, Petro-dollars and billionaire capitalism is pushing on the calendar to the point at which nothing can be done. That’s not an unreasonable point, but you only have to look across to Germany to see a football culture which places its fans front and centre.

English football hasn’t done that in decades, and that we’re at this point is the culmination of a fight that didn’t start this week. We have a game which knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. A heritage that is only worth anything for the value it has in order to make rich men richer, and to buy them influence and soft power.

And at the end of July, they’ll be back on their social media accounts, talking about ‘magic’ and ‘grassroots’ of the FA Cup again, as though they hadn’t shown their own unfitness to run it to us so vividly. At the time of writing, it’s difficult to imagine any enthusiasm for whatsoever again, and that’s a blight on both the supposed ‘custodians’ of our game and the tournament that used to be the jewel in their crown which feels permanent.