The FA Cup is the oldest cup competition in professional football. It is also the trophy that little kids growing up in England dream of lifting after winning the final at Wembley. Sadly however, nowadays FA Cup matches are regularly played out in front of huge swathes of empty seats. Seats that would ordinarily be full if it was for a Premier League match.
So has this glorious old competition really lost its shine? To me, it depends entirely upon who you ask. The 5,500 Carlisle United fans who went to Sunderland today would have a different view to many of the stay away fans of Premier League clubs no doubt, regardless of the result. Likewise the 5,750 Oldham Athletic fans packing out the away end at Anfield today. Or the Coventry City fans who eagerly awaited news of the draw for the 4th round today where they were rewarded with a trip to The Emirates, where they will likely take just as many fans, maybe even more than Tottenham did in yesterday’s 3rd round defeat.
Another argument from those that are keen to toll the death knell on the old competition is the fielding of ‘under-strength’ sides in the early rounds, much like we have become almost accustomed to in the League Cup in each of it’s sponsored guises. We are constantly reminded these days though that football is a squad game as opposed to the old days of footballers being ‘hard men’ who would happily play every other day. Indeed Aston Villa won a league title whilst fielding only 14 players throughout the entire campaign, with 7 of them also being ever-present. In todays molly-coddled times of preventative measures and performance analytics, those days are gone and will stay firmly in the past, with the average number of players used these days by the title winners being around the 30 mark (with them playing fewer matches too).
One team heavily-criticised for fielding a weakened team today were West Ham United, with Sam Allardyce making no bones about the fact that he wasn’t overly worried about being knocked out of the competition at the earliest opportunity, with him conceding that he would field 7 or 8 youngsters due to his priorities lying elsewhere, namely the Premier League where his team is currently on a run of one win from the last 13 matches as well as their Capital One Cup semi-final first leg away at Manchester City on Wednesday. A 5-0 defeat away to Championship side Nottingham Forest won’t have helped his cause though with large numbers of supporters calling for him to be sacked. The fact that his bloated wages would result in a huge pay-off muddy the waters somewhat but from his post-match comments that there may well be repercussions, a decision may need to be made sooner rather than later.
The reality is that the Premier League is where the money is and ultimately, continued poor performances there will be what determines his fate, and not a defeat on FA Cup 3rd round day, as bad as it was to stomach for the 3,500 that had travelled to the Midlands for a lunch time kick off. The debate continues as to whether football fans of ‘middling’ Premier League teams would rather see an FA Cup win at the expense of concentrating on Premier League safety. For me, having never seen an FA Cup win in my lifetime (the closest I have got was reaching a semi-final, played against a club that couldn’t afford the players in the squad and which has since been in and out of administration, plummeting to the fourth division in English football), I would happily see my team relegated in order to see a sixth FA Cup win engraved into the history and the fabric of my club.
West Ham were by no means alone in fielding a weakened team, with Villa manager Paul Lambert also speaking out that the FA Cup has become more of an interference these days and that he would be fielding a changed team. The fact that he only made a few changes as opposed to wholesale changes like other managers will not have been missed on their fan base in defeat at home to League One strugglers Sheffield United, who incidentally were backed by around 6,000 fans, who I can only imagine would’ve been ecstatic in celebrating Cup progression after the 2-1 victory.
To me, the magic of the cup is still there if you look for it. The fact that huge numbers of fans choose to stay away from home FA Cup matches is not something that I can personally understand from a footballing perspective as I am not one to go shopping or to the cinema on a Saturday instead, but with the amount of games squeezed into the festive period, I fully appreciate that money only stretches so far and this is a very real consideration for a growing number, myself included. Perhaps that is something which clubs need to look at closely and consider including early cup matches (of both variety) in with the price of their season tickets. Surely a packed stadium is more desirable than playing in a half-empty one, completely devoid of atmosphere?
There is another field of thought which suggests that teams would pay more respect to the competition if the winner was afforded entry into the qualifying round for the Champions League. Personally, though I can see the obvious benefits of such an approach, I am not sold on the idea that a team winning 6 matches on their way to silverware can leapfrog a team who have performed well consistently and secured a fourth placed finish over a 38 game season. To my mind, whether you are a fan of Champions League football or not, there is no question whatsoever over who is more deserving and, at best, I could see a scenario where there is a qualification play-off between the FA Cup winner and the team finishing 4th in the Premier League, should the cup winner not already be qualified through league position.
The reality of modern life is that people now have far more choice in terms of where to get their entertainment, not to mention demands on their wallets, than they have ever had before – and that is here to stay. If football clubs and The FA want to ensure that cup football is seen as a viable option, then they need to find ways of making it more cost-effective. Step one of that process for me is to start including cup matches (up to a certain round) in with the price of season tickets. It may not be as far as some want to go, but it would at least be a start.
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