The National League Cup gets off to a predictably dismal start

The Premier League wanted rid of FA Cup replays, and this is all the National League got in return.

It’s almost as though the idea is, in a footballing sense, a terrible one. The entire saga of the National League Cup—pitting National League clubs against Premier League Under-21s to the interest of practically nobody whatsoever—is such a strangely self-defeating one for the league whose name is attached to it that it almost feels like a fever dream. This was the trade-off then, was it? When the battle lines were being drawn in the battle for the vast amount of money that football generates, this is what you had to do to suckle at the golden teat, was it? You surrendered FA Cup replays for… this?

Scrapping FA Cup replays was a terrible idea, but as a distribution model for getting money into the non-league game, it was abysmal. Once every few years, a non-league club will earn themselves an FA Cup match against one of the great and the good. Since the FA Cup still features gate receipt sharing, an away draw against a massive club remains a life-altering amount of money in the lower divisions.

The possibility of a replay meant that even home draws, which would draw far smaller crowds, offered that carrot on a stick. Instead, we will now have penalty shootouts instead. Exeter City did this in reverse in 2005. In grabbing a goalless draw at Old Trafford, earned another round of ticket money and £150,000 for it being shown live on the television. In the end, they made not far short of £1m.

And that was in 2005 money; it would be worth £1.8m in 2024, adjusted for inflation. Owned by their fans following years of mismanagement and in a state of financial crisis, it’s no overstatement to say that those matches saved Exeter City Football Club. But of course, it should go without saying that the fact that one football club was saved by it made it a good idea, in that it turned the FA Cup draw into a lottery, in which a club either could or wouldn’t get lucky.

It would have been a better idea to pool all money and distribute it more equally between clubs, but that, of course, would have annoyed those who got the farthest, while the sheer number of clubs would mean that even combined FA Cup income wouldn’t go very far. Perhaps it was better to occasionally have one club striking it lucky than no-one at all. And if you were interested in the amount of money to be made from this all, the Premier League’s statement on the subject confirms that, “The combined prize fund for the competition is £1million, provided by the Premier League. Prize money will be distributed only to National League clubs.”

And you can feel the mild discomfort in the air over it all. The National League didn’t even announce it until a week before it was due to start, which indicated that they were already aware that people weren’t going to be checking their calendars with much urgency for this. And the number of Championship clubs taking part told a story in itself of how much enthusiasm for all this was floating around.

But in all the horse-trading that has been going on get everyone in position as the jostle for the control of football begins, the National League Cup is an obviously bad idea. How patronised, for example, might supporters of former Premier League club Oldham Athletic have felt at being expected to traipse up to Boundary Park on a night when there’s a lot of live football on the television and pay to get in to watch their team play… Stoke City Under-21s?

We got an answer to that question last night. 455. For reference, Oldham’s home attendance for league matches this season is currently 5,480, meaning just 8% of their normal crowd. These results were replicated elsewhere, with numbers that the League should be alarmed over. The highest attendance of the evening was 467, for the match between Boston United and Leeds United’s Under-21s.

Elsewhere, even those puny numbers start to fall off. 292 people, a record low in the club’s history for a competitive game, bothered with FC Halifax Town vs Newcastle United’s Under-21s. 227 saw Woking and Brighton’s Under-21s draw 2-2. 213 were at the game between Ebbsfleet United and West Bromwich Albion’s Under-21s.

By way of contrast, 762 people were at the FA Cup Third Qualifying Round match between Horsham and Margate, 63% more people for a match between two teams from two divisions below the National League than the highest attendance for the first matches played in the National League Cup. The match between Woking and Brighton attracted a massive 5,600 views. Viewing figures for NLTV, where all matches were being shown free of charge to those who registered, are not expected to be much higher.

And this raises an important question. If no-one is going to the matches, and no-one is watching the free live streams of matches, it’s tempting to start wondering what the point of all this might be, because the answer to this question may be an uncomfortable truth, which is that even the upper level of non-league football isn’t really being played for the fans any more.

We all know that this is the case higher up football’s food chain, where there is a constant flow of those who will take over the season tickets of those who are eventually either priced or bored out, but that’s simply not the case in the non-league game, and the consequence of a tournament being played for reasons that are so nakedly obviously not about anything to do with what fans would actually like feels bordering on perverse.

We all know where this ends up. If anything, clubs will stop publishing attendance figures, but the tournament will rumble on because once that foot is in the door, it stays in that door. With the possibility of another winter of garish headlines about fuel prices on the horizon, fans—even those with season tickets, since they always only cover league matches—will be expected to put up, pay up, and shut up. Same as it ever was.