The Wrong Type of Football

Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola’s rant after his team’s FA Cup Semi-Final win over Chelsea about how unfair it was that his squad of 25 highly trained and extremely well rewarded professional athletes should have to play on Saturday afternoon having already played a game on Wednesday was typical of the Premier League managers’ mindsets.

 

“Unacceptable,” he called it, "I don't understand how we survived," he added, and all the while, up and down the country, non-League footballers, managers, officials, and supporters howled with laughter at a club complaining at playing three games in eight days while many teams below the Football League would look at that schedule as quite benign. Take National League South side Truro City for instance, in the time that Manchester City played those three games, they played four. Between 1^st April and 20^th April, Truro played ten league games; Manchester City played six matches.

 

Pep Guardiola
Picture - Football.ua, CC BY-SA 3.0, 

 

Even more extreme is the schedule faced by Colne FC of the North West Counties League who will play 14 games in April, six more than City will, and Colne are by no means unique. Thanks to postponements, it’s not unusual in non-League football for teams to play almost half of their league fixtures in the last two months of the season, and these are players holding down full-time jobs and driving themselves to away games after a day at work, yet the ones we are supposed to feel sorry for are the Premier League guys whose full-time job is playing football and whose every whim is indulged.

 

The fact that Guardiola’s complaint was about playing an FA Cup tie was significant. The FA Cup used to be the jewel in the crown of English football but it has become debased and devalued over the years; to be blunt, it’s an inconvenience for Premier League clubs. The demands of the vastly over inflated Champions League make FA Cup replays an inconvenience, especially since Uefa’s demand mean that they can’t be played on Champions League dates, hence their abolition from the Fifth Round onwards during the 2018-19 season.

 

This week, The FA announced that from next season there would be no replays in the FA Cup from the First Round onwards, a sop to the Premier League clubs (although since they don’t enter until the Third Round, replays in the First and Second Round are an irrelevance to them). Other than their proposal in 2014 to introduce B teams into the Football League, I don’t think that any announcement made by The FA has met with so much opposition and outrage.

 

At this point I have to say that despite many years of believing that FA Cup replays must be preserved at pretty much any cost, I’m beginning to become a little less vehement about that. It is in the first four rounds of the competition proper that replays have value; non-League or teams from the Football League’s bottom two divisions getting draws against higher level opposition and setting up money spinning replays have always part of the competition’s attraction, but in the competition’s early and later stages, the arguments for their retention are more difficult to sustain.

 

As we know, from the Third Round on, arranging replays can be difficult because of European football getting in the way, but in the qualifying rounds is there really much magic in a Preliminary Round replay between two Step 5 teams? This season for instance, Buckhurst Hill and Brantham Athletic met in the Extra-Preliminary Round. The first game, at Buckhurst Hill, attracted just 88 people and the replay drew in only 58 spectators. Gate receipts would not have covered the match officials’ fees and with it being 70 miles between the clubs’ respective grounds, travelling costs and the like would have resulted in both clubs losing money.

 

Brantham Athletic v Buckhurst Hill FA Cup Replay – Picture: Brantham Athletic

 

Phil Annets – the man behind the FA Cup Factfile Twitter account – has said, “Everyone talks about FA Cup replays being important for financial reasons and that's been the case for a small number of clubs, but the real reason replays are needed is for competition integrity. Replays give clubs disadvantaged by being drawn away a chance to take game to their ground.” While that’s an understandable point – and Cray Valley PM and Horsham, who earned replays against Charlton  Athletic and Barnsley respectively this season would undoubtedly agree -  a one off game could actually give lower league or non-League sides a better chance of progressing. Charlton won their replay at Cray Valley 6-1 while Horsham were beaten 3-0 by Barnsley (Barnsley were subsequently found to have fielded an ineligible player and Horsham were reinstated), but had those first games gone to penalties the playing field would have been levelled; there’s no reason why an Isthmian League side shouldn’t be able to beat a League One team in a shoot-out, even if they couldn’t over 90 minutes.

 

There have been angry suggestions that Football League and non-League clubs should boycott next season’s FA Cup, but that isn’t going to happen. Despite my increasing ambivalence towards FA Cup replays, what I do object to in The FA’s announcement – and many of the clubs that have issued statements expressing anger at replays being done away with seem to hold a similar view – is that a competition with more than 700 entrants is having its terms dictated by a tiny number of clubs, the 20 Premier League clubs, who largely view the FA Cup as an inconvenience.

 

The fact that the abolition of FA Cup replays from the First Round onwards is proposed from next season is no doubt driven by the increase in the number of entries in what we might now call the Not The Champions League next season when instead of 32 clubs in the group stage, there will be 36 in a rejigged league stage. Instead of it taking 13 games to win this bloated competition, it will take 15, at which point it’s worth remembering that for a Premier League team to win the FA Cup they need play only seven games.

 

When managers like Guardiola, or Jurgen Klopp, or Eric Ten Hag, complain about their teams having to play too many games, it is always the potential FA Cup replays that vex them, and I say ‘potential’ because Manchester City have had only 10 FA Cup replays this century, Manchester United have had 9, and Liverpool have had 12, so not exactly an onerous schedule.

 

Looked at logically, if the elite Premier League clubs are concerned about fixture congestion then the target for their objections should be the Champions League, but apparently a hypothetical FA Cup replay that might involve a 100 mile round trip once every few seasons is considered more taxing than travelling a couple of thousand miles several times a season for European cup games. How about increasing the number of teams in the Champions League to 64, but make it a straight knock-out with no group stage; it would take only 11 games to win the competition, freeing up some midweek dates to reinstate FA Cup replays

 

And there is the rub; the problem isn’t too much football, but rather the wrong type of football. The Champions League is more lucrative than the FA Cup, and the bottom line is, well the bottom line on the balance sheet.

Addendum 2nd May 2024:

Since I published this blog, the Premier League and the National League have announced a new competition for 2024-25 involving 16 clubs from the National League and 16 Premier League Under 21 teams, hence the National League's willingness to give up on FA Cup replays in the First and Second Rounds. In addition, the Premier League have once again floated the 39th Game idea - an additional fixture in the Premier League programme - to be played in the USA. Further proof - if we ever needed it - that there aren't too many games, just the wrong type.