Apart from advocating the idea that replays should be abolished in
the FA Cup, Gary Lineker also recently came up with the idea that non-League
teams should kick-off the competition in the Spring, i.e. by now we should be
approaching the end of the Qualifying Rounds for next season’s FA Cup. Both of
Gary Lineker’s ideas are predicated on benefiting Premier League teams of
course, the teams with the biggest and best squads in English football, but who
somehow find the prospect of possibly playing one additional game in the period
between early January and late April an impossible burden.
As someone who supports a non-League side, I find the complaints
of Premier League clubs about fixture congestion highly amusing. Come the back
end of the season, many non-League clubs – the majority of whom have players who
work full time in addition to playing football – are playing three, or even
four games every week. For instance, in 2000-01 season, Romford played 23 games
in the last 65 days of the season, and in 2013-14, played 20 in the last 56 days.
In 1997-98, Redditch United played on 9 (yes, nine) consecutive days to make up
their fixtures. Jurgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola would probably not even be able
to comprehend those sorts of statistics!
The FA have already acceded to the demands of the Premier League
clubs by switching Fifth Round ties to midweek and doing away with replays from
that point onwards, so I imagine that if enough people put forward a convincing
enough case for non-League sides to start their FA Cup campaign in February or
March, I actually believe that they would listen. Now you may think that the
idea is a non-starter – I certainly did, for at least two very important
reasons – but then I thought about how it could be made to work, and am convinced
that it could be, not that I think it is a good idea, though. After all, it is
easy to think of reasons why ideas won’t work if one is fundamentally opposed
to the idea, far more thought provoking and rewarding to come up with ways in
which a thing could be made possible, regardless of its merits.
The first reason why Lineker’s idea ought not to work is that
entry into the FA Cup is based on where clubs are in the National League System
(that’s football below the Football League, i.e. National League down to county
leagues)[1].
From the 2020-21 season, with the expansion of Steps 4 and 5, there will be no
Step 6 sides in the FA Cup in future, (although the number of clubs entering is
staying about the same) since those that would have been eligible will have
been promoted to Step 5.
Since no one knows which Step a particular club will be in until
the final league tables are compiled in April or May, it would be impossible to
identify all of the clubs that would be eligible to enter the FA Cup.
Similarly, the Step at which a club plays determines which Qualifying Round
they enter at, and again that isn’t known until the end of the season. But that
is all old-fashioned thinking, there is a perfectly feasible solution based on
the principle that rules are for the obedience of fools and the guidance of
wise men. The wise men of The FA could set their rules aside and base
qualification and exemptions on the basis of the season before. This would
throw up an anomaly or two, for instance starting next season’s FA Cup in
February 2020 would have meant that last season’s National League champions
Leyton Orient would have to be treated as a non-League club, while Notts
County, relegated from League Two, would count as a Football League side, even
though they have now swapped places. The number of teams affected by a change
of this sort is actually quite small, and will even itself out over a couple of
seasons. Some years it would benefit some teams, in others it would disadvantage
them.
A more valid reason for not going down this route is the weather.
We have seen this season what devasting effects the weather can have on the
football programme, in non-League football at least, and it isn’t the first
time. Clubs are already hard pushed to fit their league games in when it comes
to February and March, adding FA Cup ties into the mix clearly won’t work. Or
would it? It might mean that league cup competitions have to take a back seat
for a season to fit the games in, but if we began with the idea of the FA Cup
for 2021-22 starting in February 2021, then frontloaded the fixtures in 2020-21
so that clubs had played 75-80% of their league fixtures by the end of December
instead of the 55% that would have played by Christmas had they all been played
on their scheduled dates, then dates would be freed up in the second half of
the season to get the FA Cup qualifiers played. Getting the bulk of the league
games played before the poor weather starts would have the added bonus of
reducing fixture congestion in the last couple of months of the season.
Frontloading the fixtures and playing the FA Cup qualifying rounds
in Spring would mean that for clubs eliminated in the Extra-Preliminary or Preliminary
Rounds of the competition, February and March might now have a blank Saturday
or two, but this would allow league games to be re-arranged, and of course in
winters like this one, not having a game scheduled might actually be a good
thing.
The rationale behind all of this must be to get the Premier League
clubs into the competition earlier in the season; the Third Round would have to
be played in September or October for the change to benefit them. As an
alternative, the FA Cup Qualifying Rounds could be condensed. At present they
are fortnightly, but if they had been played weekly this season the First Round
Proper could have been played as early as 21st September, the Third
Round could feasibly have been on 5th October. In fact, with the
right sort of attitude, we could get the whole FA Cup done and dusted by
mid-November!
I’m not serious of course, since just as the attitude that because
something has always been done a certain way it can never be changed should be
challenged, the idea that because a thing can be changed, it should be
changed has many flaws. That said, I hope that no one from The FA ever reads
this, it might give them ideas!
[1]
Wikipedia has a comprehensive explanation of how the National League System
works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_League_System
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