The Magic of the Cup
With the men's international break out of the way ...
Hello again! Let’s get back at this, shall we?
It was an enjoyable midweek courtesy of Chloe Kelly’s deliveries (thanks Manchester City!) and Alessia Russo’s finishing but even as the men’s international break ends Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal team have to wait a few more days to get back on the pitch, since it’s an FA Cup weekend. Anyway, I have plenty of thoughts about it being an FA Cup weekend, so have those before I write something about Real Madrid next week.
Seeing Newcastle lift the League Cup a couple of weeks ago left me torn. This is entirely personal and others may feel different but the success, to me, feels somewhat inorganic. It has been earned — the players and the staff have worked hard and worked well — but at great expense. And I don’t really mean financial expense, but human expense, I mean where the finances and the drive that have led to the success has come from.
And then there are the ordinary people. People like me and probably like you. There are club owners, or those running the game at UEFA and FIFA, who act like the game is their own but it isn’t, it’s ours, and people just like me and you had waited 70 years to watch Newcastle lift a domestic trophy. They had heard the stories from their grandparents about what it was like, they had dreamed for decades that they would see it for themselves one day. They likely, in many cases, went through years of believing they would never see it happen in their lifetime.
People like Dan Burn, who opened the scoring, and his family. His story in particular is obviously an incredible one.
Stories like this — a huge club and passionate fanbase celebrate a trophy after a wait that spanned generations — are a major reason a lot of us love sport in general and love football in particular. Unfortunately, there are far too few of them nowadays.
Which is why, even with Arsenal out and thus not in action this weekend, I’m really excited about this weekend’s FA Cup quarter-finals.
Since Wimbledon won their only FA Cup in 1988, so over last 37 years, there have been 10 different FA Cup winners and just three first-time winners.
Of the 36 FA Cups won in that time, 22 have been won by either Arsenal (eight), Manchester United or Chelsea (both seven). Another seven have been won by either Liverpool or Manchester City. Leaving just seven for the rest of English football with three of those picked up by first-time (and still just one-time) winners in Portsmouth, Wigan and Leicester.
The six different winners since Wigan in 2013 have included one non-’Big Six’ club and that was Leicester, who have also had a Premier League title to celebrate in that time.
Newcastle this season became the first team outside the ‘Big Six’ to win the League Cup since Swansea in 2013 and just the third since Middlesbrough in 2004. And all this despite the top clubs never really seeming to take that competition particularly seriously at all, at least not until the final rounds.
If your club is not part of the elite in English football, you will almost certainly never see them win a major trophy.
This year’s FA Cup, though, looks like a serious opportunity. Of the remaining eight teams, four have never won not just the FA Cup but any major trophy. Three of the remaining four have won it a combined 11 times but not once since 1959. What a monumental opportunity they have to write history.
Bournemouth: Zero major trophies, zero FA Cup/League Cup finals.
Brighton: Zero major trophies, FA Cup runners-up 1983
Fulham: Zero major trophies, FA Cup runners-up 1975, Europa League runners-up 2010
Crystal Palace: Zero major trophies, FA Cup runners-up 1990, 2016
Preston: Two-time FA Cup winners, last in 1938, last final in 1964
Nottingham Forest: Two-time European Cup winners, last major trophy (League Cup) in 1990, last FA Cup win in 1959, last FA Cup final 1991
Aston Villa: One European Cup, seven top flight titles, seven FA Cups … but no trophy since the League Cup 1996, two FA Cup finals (two defeats: 2000, 2015) since their last win (1957)
and then there’s also Man City.
You’ll have different feelings about the clubs above, ones you’d rather not see succeed, those you might have a soft spot for. I certainly do.
But above all else, it’s just healthy for the sport when there’s real diversity in terms of who wins things. Naturally, I’d rather see Arsenal win everything all the time, but that wouldn’t be good for football — or the vast majority of football fans — either.
Manchester City winning the FA Cup this season would be just another medal for those players and just another day out for those fans. They already have vast collections of all of the above, accumulated about as recently as possible. I hope this season sees those days out at Wembley, and ultimately the trophy, go to fanbases who have maybe never had the chance to have a day like that before and may never have that chance again.
Seeing as we can’t watch the Arsenal men’s team anyway this weekend, it’ll be nice to just spend 48 hours as football fan, seeing other football fans celebrate goals and wins because it means absolutely everything to them. More of that, please.