FA Cup revival incoming after ‘financial apartheid’ took hold of football
We live in an era when we don’t just talk about the game losing the magic of the FA Cup and whether it even exists, we talk about the talk about losing the magic of the FA Cup. And in a very meta trend, even talk about the talk about the talk about the magic of the FA Cup.
And all that can be concluded is that things change. Fifty years ago, the FA Cup was more important than winning the First Division. Now it’s been demoted by money and ceaseless Premier League and Champions League marketing with breathless propaganda to a pliant audience.
But slowly, I see the FA Cup being more important to most than at any time since the 80s. Along with the League Cup, it has become the route to actually achieving something rewarding for the club and fans in this otherwise hopelessly barren time when everything else has been pushed off-limits via financial chicanery.
In short, the greedy field a second team to preserve the little darlings for more financially lucrative tournaments and are thus vulnerable. Slowly, bit by bit, financial apartheid is taking effect. It’s inevitable as financial disparity grows ever wider and creates a wealthy elite who can afford the best of everything (though not a half-decent reserve team, apparently), which ironically is making the clubs without really big money accept that there’s little available for them to achieve, apart from not getting relegated. As indeed it always was.
No point in pretending it’s going to change. There are those dreamers who want to be bought and lavishly funded by the Thai government or Elon Musk. But the unrealistic and unacceptable fantasies of the delusional element of the fanbase should be disregarded as toxic. The FA Cup used to be good enough for the vast majority; it still is.
It doesn’t mean it won’t yet be won by the usual suspects, it will take time to change, but the trend is underway. And it’s joyful. While Championship sides looking for promotion might still be selective in their team choices, Orient, Plymouth and Birmingham proved how a lower-league side can hold its own against a weakened top Premier League side.
Many, if not most, top-flight games are part of a fight to finish eighth or 13th or 15th so there is inevitably little jeopardy. Often more exhibition than competition. The cups were always there for those teams but for some reason, probably financial, they went through a period of all-but throwing the cup games, just to concentrate on finishing ninth instead of 12th. While the top sides grow more separate from the pack, doubtless ultimately Super League bound (hopefully) the more traditional pursuit of a good cup run takes on more importance for everyone else. There’s nothing more fashionable than that which once was seen as old-fashioned, is there?
While football offers everyone the chance to wrap themselves in the blanket of nostalgia, I don’t think this is wishful thinking. For years, the cups seemed rather quaint echoes of historical glories that took you back down the vista of years.
The FA Cup has hung on through the bleak years and the gainsayers and killjoys, who sought to measure and grade everything, like a teenage boy with a ruler. And it survived for the least controversial reason: fans liked it, even when clubs and managers didn’t and saw playing football as basically an undesirable thing for a football club to do.
It was always pernicious, not to say witless, to list trophies or competitions in some sort of notional desirability. How replete with privilege must you be to do that? One of Middlesbrough’s most unforgettable triumphant moments was winning the League Cup. I’m not having someone tell me it’s the fourth most desirable thing to win. It’s plain stupid. What a sh*tkicker of an idea. Everything has value.
After all, why deny yourself pleasure by imposing some sort of achievement hierarchy on the club and yourself? It’s senseless. Like cutting your cock off because someone will only fondle your balls.
Let’s face it, that infamous Salt Bae sucker Mikel Arteta would be trophyless without the FA Cup. If he didn’t have that cup under his belt, people might think he’s a perpetual nearly man who will never win anything, despite leaping around like an electrocuted cat in an animal testing laboratory. And that will never do.
The excitement of making progress in the cup thrills all but the sour-faced spoilsports who think it’s unimportant and though the FA – never shy of ruining something good, in collusion with TV broadcasters – have spread rounds across four or five days and thus have diminished some of the one-day drama, it offers most fans the opportunity to be engaged in a way trying to tie down ninth position cannot.
It offers failing clubs a much-needed opportunity to make something of the season. Something to cling to – a route into the Europa League which is so financially dominated so massively by English clubs, that it should never be won by anyone else. And the Champions League from there.
Perhaps realism is finally dawning on most clubs that the FA Cup offers a big chance of glory, much more so than an abjectly forgettable 11th-place finish in the league. Forget the play-for-money teams, the cups aren’t about them.
And maybe that’s why this round of games has been so enjoyable and all the guff about the magic of the FA Cup no longer sounds like a hollow reflex.