IRISH HISTORIAN JOE Lee was analysing the decline of the nation’s “sacred cow” – the Irish language – after independence when he declared that the Irish elite had stumbled on an unusual feat of “losing on the swings and on the roundabouts”.
The English Football Association might empathise, (although they might use ‘crown jewel’ instead.)
This weekend will once again show what a denuded thing the FA Cup has become, stripped of its tradition and relegated to just another storyline in the endless palace intrigue of the Premier League’s voracious giants.
The Cup and its relevance was swallowed a long time ago by the League’s hungry giants, once and for all dismissed by Alex Ferguson’s belching that he might find more magic in the Club World Cup.
The most recent explosion in the Premier League TV rights has seen once-lowly minnows of English football – the Leicesters, Bournemouths and Southamptons of the world – renounce it too, using the Cup weekend to rest key players so they are fresh to tread water in the lucrative league.
The Premier League is partly as gargantuan as it is thanks to the FA’s fecklessness in its foundation. When the Big Five of Liverpool, Everton, Manchester United, Arsenal and Spurs were threatening to break away, the early outlines of the Premier League were proposed in a document called the Blueprint For English Football.
It outlined plans for a new, slimmed-down 18-team Premier League with the ostensible aim of helping the FA and the England national team, with weekends prior to England games free.
At the very first meeting after the announcement of the Blueprint, the first question from the clubs was naturally if there was any room for manoeuvre on the number of sides in the competition.
The FA’s Chairman, Bert Millichip, shrugged and said, “It’s your league, you decide.”
Brian Glanville would later sardonically call him Bert The Inert.
Even before that, the FA’s interminable torpor allowed clubs to circumvent ancient rules stating that football clubs couldn’t be run as businesses.
There had been a long-standing rule in place to prevent clubs from paying any more than 7.5% of profit as a dividend, but in 1983 Tottenham found a way of working around the rule by creating a holding company which owned the club as a legal subsidiary.
Spurs did write to the FA to tell them of their intentions…and received no reply.
Everyone followed suit, and today the biggest club in England is owned by Manchester United plc and is registered in the Cayman Islands.
Graham Kelly, the CEO of the FA during the formation of the Premier League, reflected in 2004 that his organisation were guilty of a “tremendous, collective lack of vision”, lamenting that “so many things have come back to haunt us, which could have been dealt with by establishing principles then: on the financial integrity of the game, on agents, good management of clubs, putting country before club.”
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Former FA CEO Graham Kelly holds aloft the FA Cup in 1999. PA Archive / PA Images
PA Archive / PA Images / PA Images
As clubs took to rampant profiteering in Europe and then, unfathomably, in the lower reaches of the Premier League, this quaint little cup was stripped of its lustre.
As a genuine prize, it doesn’t matter to the top clubs: the sin is to be caught outside of Europe’s elite, and Louis Van Gaal and Antonio Conte were fired for having the temerity to parade such ignominy around Wembley.
In a bid to keep their competition relevant, the FA have sold their own sacred cow and robbed it of its history and its tradition. The shifting of semi-finals to Wembley diminished the impact of the final…which they moved to an evening kick-off to suit television demands.
As part of selling an £820m overseas TV contract, there are as many fourth-round games kicking off this weekend outside of the traditional 3pm Saturday slot as there are within it.
Arsenal and Manchester United play tonight, and the game’s main preview angle is not whether Ole Gunnar Solskjaer or Unai Emery can wreath their debut campaigns in glory, but is whether Alexis Sanchez, a symbol of the league’s feckless and extravagant waste, can finally show whether his investment was worth anything beyond the retweets and the ‘market penetration’.
He might be brilliant, and we can all spin a fleeting narrative of redemption before we get on with the business of configuring his fall.
How dearly the FA Cup needs a redemption arc of its own.
FA Cup fourth-round fixtures (Kick-off 3pm unless stated)
Friday
Bristol City v Bolton (7.45pm)
Arsenal v Manchester United (7.55pm)
Saturday
Accrington Stanley v Derby County (12.30pm)
Shrewsbury v Wolves
Middlesbrough v Newport County
Swansea City v Gillingham
Newcastle v Watford
Brighton v West Brom
Doncaster v Oldham
Manchester City v Burnley
Portsmouth v QPR
Millwall v Everton (5.30pm)
AFC Wimbledon v West Ham (7.45pm)
Sunday
Crystal Palace v Spurs (4pm)
Chelsea v Sheffield Wednesday (6pm)
Monday
Barnet v Brentford (7.45pm)
Just over a week out from the 2019 Six Nations openers, Murray Kinsella and Gavan Casey are joined by Bernard Jackman to look at Ireland’s bid for another Grand Slam:
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Clash of Premier League giants a reminder of how far the FA Cup has fallen
IRISH HISTORIAN JOE Lee was analysing the decline of the nation’s “sacred cow” – the Irish language – after independence when he declared that the Irish elite had stumbled on an unusual feat of “losing on the swings and on the roundabouts”.
The English Football Association might empathise, (although they might use ‘crown jewel’ instead.)
This weekend will once again show what a denuded thing the FA Cup has become, stripped of its tradition and relegated to just another storyline in the endless palace intrigue of the Premier League’s voracious giants.
The Cup and its relevance was swallowed a long time ago by the League’s hungry giants, once and for all dismissed by Alex Ferguson’s belching that he might find more magic in the Club World Cup.
The most recent explosion in the Premier League TV rights has seen once-lowly minnows of English football – the Leicesters, Bournemouths and Southamptons of the world – renounce it too, using the Cup weekend to rest key players so they are fresh to tread water in the lucrative league.
The Premier League is partly as gargantuan as it is thanks to the FA’s fecklessness in its foundation. When the Big Five of Liverpool, Everton, Manchester United, Arsenal and Spurs were threatening to break away, the early outlines of the Premier League were proposed in a document called the Blueprint For English Football.
It outlined plans for a new, slimmed-down 18-team Premier League with the ostensible aim of helping the FA and the England national team, with weekends prior to England games free.
At the very first meeting after the announcement of the Blueprint, the first question from the clubs was naturally if there was any room for manoeuvre on the number of sides in the competition.
The FA’s Chairman, Bert Millichip, shrugged and said, “It’s your league, you decide.”
Brian Glanville would later sardonically call him Bert The Inert.
Even before that, the FA’s interminable torpor allowed clubs to circumvent ancient rules stating that football clubs couldn’t be run as businesses.
There had been a long-standing rule in place to prevent clubs from paying any more than 7.5% of profit as a dividend, but in 1983 Tottenham found a way of working around the rule by creating a holding company which owned the club as a legal subsidiary.
Spurs did write to the FA to tell them of their intentions…and received no reply.
Everyone followed suit, and today the biggest club in England is owned by Manchester United plc and is registered in the Cayman Islands.
Graham Kelly, the CEO of the FA during the formation of the Premier League, reflected in 2004 that his organisation were guilty of a “tremendous, collective lack of vision”, lamenting that “so many things have come back to haunt us, which could have been dealt with by establishing principles then: on the financial integrity of the game, on agents, good management of clubs, putting country before club.”
As clubs took to rampant profiteering in Europe and then, unfathomably, in the lower reaches of the Premier League, this quaint little cup was stripped of its lustre.
As a genuine prize, it doesn’t matter to the top clubs: the sin is to be caught outside of Europe’s elite, and Louis Van Gaal and Antonio Conte were fired for having the temerity to parade such ignominy around Wembley.
In a bid to keep their competition relevant, the FA have sold their own sacred cow and robbed it of its history and its tradition. The shifting of semi-finals to Wembley diminished the impact of the final…which they moved to an evening kick-off to suit television demands.
As part of selling an £820m overseas TV contract, there are as many fourth-round games kicking off this weekend outside of the traditional 3pm Saturday slot as there are within it.
Arsenal and Manchester United play tonight, and the game’s main preview angle is not whether Ole Gunnar Solskjaer or Unai Emery can wreath their debut campaigns in glory, but is whether Alexis Sanchez, a symbol of the league’s feckless and extravagant waste, can finally show whether his investment was worth anything beyond the retweets and the ‘market penetration’.
He might be brilliant, and we can all spin a fleeting narrative of redemption before we get on with the business of configuring his fall.
How dearly the FA Cup needs a redemption arc of its own.
FA Cup fourth-round fixtures (Kick-off 3pm unless stated)
Friday
Bristol City v Bolton (7.45pm)
Arsenal v Manchester United (7.55pm)
Saturday
Accrington Stanley v Derby County (12.30pm)
Shrewsbury v Wolves
Middlesbrough v Newport County
Swansea City v Gillingham
Newcastle v Watford
Brighton v West Brom
Doncaster v Oldham
Manchester City v Burnley
Portsmouth v QPR
Millwall v Everton (5.30pm)
AFC Wimbledon v West Ham (7.45pm)
Sunday
Crystal Palace v Spurs (4pm)
Chelsea v Sheffield Wednesday (6pm)
Monday
Barnet v Brentford (7.45pm)
Just over a week out from the 2019 Six Nations openers, Murray Kinsella and Gavan Casey are joined by Bernard Jackman to look at Ireland’s bid for another Grand Slam:
The42 Rugby Weekly / SoundCloud
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Alexis Sánchez Arsenal FA Cup little magic in the cup Manchester United