If big clubs got their snouts out of the trough, they’d realise trophies are most valuable currency of all
ONE of the season’s most dispiriting conversations was with an executive at a Premier League club about plans for a 32-team summer Club World Cup that FiFA will launch with a tournament in America in summer 2025.
‘People can’t get enough of these big games between the top clubs,’ he said with a smothering degree of self-regard. ‘They are better than all those boring FA Cup matches.’
This is where so many people at our top clubs miss the point. They mistakenly believe that what they feel and think in their money- saturated, cash- driven parallel universe automatically equates to what football supporters want or need. And it doesn’t.
This week we have seen the details of next season’s expanded Champions League.
More games, more money. if you listen carefully, it’s possible to hear pigs’ trotters ploughing through the mud towards the trough. Doesn’t smell too good, does it?
And now, at last, football’s gravy train has arrived at the repugnant station it has been heading towards for so long. From next season there will be no FA Cup replays from the third round onwards.
Having been tugging at it for so long, the big clubs have now pulled the rug from under the feet of the clubs further down the divisions who value and treasure FA Cup exposure and income in a way that is alien to a Premier League awash with cash from TV and sponsorship.
These two developments are linked, of course. it’s impossible to squeeze extra European games into the calendar without taking something out. Despite the lamentable standard at the bottom of the table, the Premier League will never be tapered down to comprise fewer clubs and games. Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas.
So, depressingly and predictably, it’s the very fabric of our game that takes another snip, that suffers another hack at its hem. it’s a play as full of selfinterest as it is of vanity.
Yet as the FA Cup prepares to take that hit, the timing of this news is pertinent. For quarterfinal weekend has arrived with three of our richest and most aspirational clubs clinging desperately to the hope that the dear old competition may yet save their season. Funny how sport works, eh?
Erik ten Hag, Mauricio Pochettino, Eddie Howe. How much money would you wager on all of them still being in work at Manchester United, Chelsea and Newcastle respectively next season? Not a penny, i would imagine.
Ten Hag may well be walking in a dead man’s shoes already. Pochettino cannot get a regular tune from his players, while those who feel Howe is safe in the North East probably need a quick refresher course on how sportswashing works.
Gulf states don’t buy football clubs to move slowly and methodically. And they certainly don’t buy them to move backwards. Yet the FA Cup is here and suddenly it offers opportunity. Opportunity to make a statement with a big performance — United host Liverpool while Newcastle are at Manchester City — and an opportunity to reach a Wembley semi-final. And then, after that, who knows?
And this is what so many people at the top of the English game are reluctant to understand, until they wake up one morning and the fact they are 11th in the Premier League table and going nowhere smacks them in the face.
Victories and trophies: they remain the most valuable currency of all.
So, of course the big clubs purport not to care about the FA Cup very much. it doesn’t even make them that much money. So they field understrength teams in the early rounds and they talk it down and belittle it and talk big about it being a competition for the smaller clubs.
But then Wembley looms into view and they realise, out there on the grass, it does matter, whether they admit it or not.
Last year, for example, Howe took Newcastle to Wembley for the Carabao Cup final and lost to United. That was a huge victory for Ten Hag. it bought him time with the supporters and made his stewardship more credible.
The same would apply now with the FA Cup. Another trophy would also help ease Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s attempts to take United from one era in to the next.
The same applies to Howe and the Saudis, and Pochettino and Todd Boehly.
Trophies and winning represent so much of what sport is about but in the modern game it also serves to quieten noise. Not much about the FA Cup appeals to some of our big clubs when viewed through the prism of a balance sheet or a game in New York against Barcelona.
But the truth is the FA Cup offers hope, salvation and a shot at progress. it always did. if allowed to survive in some form, it always will. Executives at clubs obsessed with Europe, the world and all those lucrative big projects should think about that as they put their heels on its throat this week.