Dave’s Football Blog

Earlier this week, this headline on cheeky soccer blog Who Ate All the Pies jumped out at me: The FA Cup first round proper – do we give a shit?

Perhaps this was a reaction to an early stage of the competition filled with lots of small clubs that only have local appeal in England. The Premier League and Championship clubs don’t enter the competition until the third round proper in January, so the FA Cup won’t bring the glam until then. The question remains, though, whether the FA Cup even brings the glam at all.

To the big four in England, the FA Cup ranks a very distant third behind the twin towers of Premier League and Champions League. In fact, if you asked Arsene Wenger if he’d rather win three FA Cups on the trot or one Champions League, he’d surely choose the latter.

Of course, it’s an irony that it’s still one of the big four Prem teams that is most likely to win the competition that means less to them than everyone else. There are fewer and fewer giant-killing results each year, even when Prem teams put out weakened teams, as many now do.

Indeed, even with little incentive to win the FA Cup, the Big Four clubs — Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool and Man U — keep raising it every May. The last time one of those four clubs didn’t win the FA Cup? 1995.

This makes we wonder why they were so against UEFA boss Michel Platini’s proposal to give domestic cup winners a spot in the Champions League — a concept that, to his credit he won’t let die.

‘We can do that in three years. We can come back on that,’ he told BBC News 24 programme Hard Talk.

Platini denied being forced into an embarrassing climbdown over the issue, claiming it proved he was willing to listen to the concerns of others.

He explained their fears, saying: ‘The leagues are not in favour because they have to sell their own leagues and if they lost one of the four Champions League teams, they think they would have more problems selling their TV rights.’

That seems like a fairly ridiculous argument, when you think about it. Do fans of the Premier League really care if the top three, rather than the top four, made it into the Champions League? And if the big four always win the FA Cup, doesn’t that mean the fourth-place club would get the berth anyway? Are they afraid that other clubs will start caring so much about the FA Cup that they won’t be able to blood their reserves anymore?

I wrote back in May that the riches of the Premier League dwarf the FA Cup, and that doesn’t appear to be changing any time soon. Right now, the FA Cup is little more than a lottery for smaller clubs. (Make it to the third round, boys, and we’ll throw your name into a hat with the biggest clubs in the world. Draw a game at their house, and you win half the gate!!! Woohoo!!!) The big prize for winning — a million quid and a UEFA Cup bid — doesn’t mean a lot to Premier League clubs that make 40-to-50 million pounds just for avoiding relegation.

If anything, Platini is trying to make domestic cups matter again. Tradition and history aren’t enough to make these competitions viable in the 21st century. Clubs need incentive to chase the prize. If anything, this will make the FA Cup even more important to the Big Four, and they’re already winning the FA Cup without that much effort now. Why should they object to this idea? Do they just not want to work for it? Would they rather that Cup competitions disappeared or became as irrelevant as the one in America?

I can understand the attitude toward the Carling Cup; England doesn’t really need two knockout tournaments. Still, this attitude that giving a Champions League spot to the FA Cup winner would somehow hurt the Premier League’s TV contracts is preposterous. If anything, it would make both competitions more competitive, thus making them more marketable. Plus, the fans would certainly love seeing more meaningful matches every year. Then again, when was the last time G-14 members ever really did anything for the fans?