The Great FA Cup Opportunity

The elimination of five of the *cough* Big Six, coupled with the mixed state of the one that remains, means an opportunity has arisen for an upwardly mobile club in the market for some silverware.

It somehow has only become truly apparent over the last 48-72 hours or so, but there’s been something strange about this year’s FA Cup. We’re now at the quarter-finals stage and only one of the ‘Big Six’ are left in it. It is, somehow, only seeing the quarter-final draw that seems to have really made this strangeness clear.

The historical record on the matter is a pretty stark reveal of the extent to which football in England has been colonised by a tiny number of clubs since the formation of the Premier League. Over the last thirty years, a football club that isn’t Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City or Manchester United—let’s not talk about Tottenham Hotspur, they are excluded from this conversation—has only won this competition on three occasions; Portsmouth in 2008, Wigan Athletic in 2013, and Leicester City in 2021.

But this year, they’ve almost all gone. Arsenal fell in the Third Round, on penalty kicks to Manchester United. Chelsea and Spurs fell in the Fourth, to Brighton and Aston Villa respectively. And then in the last round, Manchester United exited on penalties, losing to Fulham and leaving Manchester City as the last ones left standing. And they haven’t been in show-shopping shape for much of this season.

Whisper it quietly, but someone else might win the FA Cup, this year. It’s also notable that of the other seven clubs still involved, six are others from the top half of the Premier League, all of which lends itself to my growing feeling that the middle-rank of that division are catching the bigger clubs up, likely thanks to smarter scouting, the use of analytics, and a broadening of the complexities of running the backroom functions of the playing side of a club.

Preston North End are the one outlier of this septuplet; they’re mid-table in the Championship, where they always seem to be. They’ll have to win three consecutive games against teams from the top half of the Premier League to win the FA Cup, and that does seem like quite a tall order. They haven’t played any yet, and they needed penalties to get past Wycombe Wanderers, though it is fair to say that their 3-0 win against Burnley was both impressive and comprehensive.

But what of that other six? How fascinating. They’re all positioned between third and tenth in the Premier League, and with two-thirds of the season now played there are just six points between those two positions. Of the seven clubs that occupy those positions you might have identified Newcastle United as the one most likely to, but they were knocked out in the last round by Brighton.

None of them have won anything for a really long time. Aston Villa’s last major trophy came in 1996. Nottingham Forest’s was 1990. Brighton’s was the 1910 Charity Shield, if we’re allowing that. Bournemouth, Fulham and Crystal Palace have never won one. Preston, for the record, haven’t won one since 1938. So how can there not be a hunger there, among these clubs? One of them is going to get to the FA Cup final, and possibly two.

And that makes a difference. It means that the FA Cup matters this year. For once, it won’t be the least important part of somebody’s sextuple bid to hoover up all the silverware in Christendom or a ‘consolation’ prize for whoever finished second to Manchester City in the Premier League, or Manchester United.

We’ve had the very occasional seasons of these before, of course, with the most notable being the 2007/08 season. That year, everything seemed normal as late as the morning of the Fifth Round. Spurs, of course, had already got knocked out, but this had been away to Manchester United, and the Manchester United of 2008 was a very different beast to the Manchester United of 2025. Manchester City lost away to Sheffield United but this, of course, was pre-Abu Dhabi City.

But over the course of the next two rounds, the rest all fell. Manchester United hammered Arsenal and Liverpool were beaten at home by Barnsley in the Fifth Round. And in the quarter-finals, the last two fell. Barsnley followed up their incredible win at Anfield by beating Chelsea 1-0 at Oakwell, while Manchester United were beaten at home to Portsmouth by a second half Sully Muntari penalty. Portsmouth went on to lift the trophy, beating Cardiff City 1-0 in the final. Just over two years later they became the first—and to date only—Premier League club to enter administration.

It’s to the FA’s significant advantage that so much of the League system is already looking a little stale. Liverpool are 14 points clear at the top of the Premier League. The teams occupying the relegation places are those who came up last season, and they’ll likely be replaced by at least two of the three who went down last season, and quite possbly all three. Birmingham City are twelve points clear at the top of League One. Walsall lead League Two by fourteen.

None of this is to say that there isn’t anything diverting to come over the last third of the season across the top four divisions. The chase for a Champions League place could yet become like an episode of Jeux Sans Frontieres and the foot of the Championship is usually a bunfight of some description or other. And the various degrees of non-league football are providing some extremely tight positions near the top.

Manchester City’s away draw against Bournemouth—and that’s a tough match; Bournemouth beat them when they met in the League in November—means that there is a possibility that there could be no ‘Big Six’ representation in the semi-finals of this competition for the first time in 17 years.

But while it’s reasonable to say that the financial rewards for winning the FA Cup are nothing like what they would be for winning the Premier League, they’re still have a tangible value. The place in the Europa League that comes with winning it would be extremely welcome to most of the other seven.

And the intangible does also matter. Winning the FA Cup, if you support a club that does not usually do this sort of thing, is a day that you simply do not forget. These are the reasons why we get involved with the game in the first place. The chase for a place in the Champions League… yes, yes, yes, it’s all very important and there’s a lot of money at stake, but the race to win your first piece of silverware in thirty years or longer, or perhaps ever, makes the end stages of this competition feel like they matter in a way that they haven’t for years.

Yes, it’s a shame that they’ve broken the format of the tournament. Yes, it’s a shame that VAR has been allowed to stick its nosey beak into everything, all the worse because it’s not being applied until a certain stage of the competition. Yes, the abolition of replays is an abomination. And yes, from the perspective of the early rounds of the competition there wasn’t a great deal of giant-killing going on. But just that line-up of quarter-final fixtures just gets something stirring. The FA Cup may not be back. Not in a meaningful sense. But it has shown faint signs of life, and during times like these that’s something to hold onto, at least.