If you ever plan to take part in an English pub quiz then there are several pieces of information in this next sentence that you'll want to commit to memory. The FA Cup is the world’s oldest football competition and has run since 1871 with the first final won by Wanderers FC 1-0 against The Royal Engineers, with the match being played at the Kennington Oval now home to my team, Surrey County Cricket Club.
Since it's inception all those years ago The Cup has held a special place in the hearts of football supporters not just in England but across the world. However, in recent years there has been a feeling that the competition has gotten a little stale, that the winners almost always come from the upper echelons of the Premier League and that even then the big clubs don't necessarily take the games that seriously. The erosion in the importance of The FA Cup to English football has been a long, slow and predictable process but perhaps with a platform such as Scorum whose founding principles of community and inclusion mirror those of the FA's original plans for this competition, there is still hope that it could make a comeback.
The decay of the cup
Premier League Overkill
When I was growing up we didn't have Sky TV so the chance of watching live football at home on the small screen was fairly limited. My footballing staples as a child involved watching channel 4's Football Italia on a Sunday afternoon, The Champions League on Wednesdays (that was before it too moved to subscription channels) and of course the FA Cup which under British law is protected as a sporting event and must be shown on free to air channels. These days everything has changed, I have access to both Sky and BT Sport who carry live Premier League and Champions League football ( I don't pay for either but that's a different story) and if I choose to, I could probably watch 20 live games of football a week with a minimum 5 EPL games being shown across any given weekend. Even ardent football fans will admit that you can have too much of a good thing and of course with the money and power that the world's richest league has at its disposal it has no problem ramming home its advantage over the FA Cup which is, in essence, a competitor for viewing figures and ticket sales. From an armchair fans point of view, the magic of the cup has been diluted by the sheer volume of football that is now beamed directly onto our TVs, computers and mobile devices on a year-round basis.
The price of football
For those of us who might like to get out of the house once in a while and take in the sights and sounds of a live match, there is the obvious barrier of cost. Football has traditionally been seen as the working man's game, something to do on a Saturday after a long week at work. These days you need to either be pulling in the kind of wage that is generally reserved for investment bankers or prioritise football above most other luxury costs to be able to afford a ticket to the game. While some clubs will include FA Cup tickets within the cost of a season ticket, most don't and watching the home fixtures in The Cup is an add-on expense for fans who may have already shelled out thousands of pounds to attend the 19 EPL home fixtures that constitute a season. You might hope that the clubs towards the top of the football pyramid in this country would seek to discount ticket prices for the FA Cup and ensure full grounds for these one-off games but as a report showed early this year, the reality is that most big clubs these days don't need to fill their stadiums to turn a profit. As noted above, clubs are sustained by the big TV deals they can secure rather than by the engagement of the local community which had in previous years been at the core of what made the FA Cup so special.
The FA has us sold out
I could probably write a whole other essay about why a bunch of middle age, middle class, white men who have a vested interest in the status quo are doing more harm than good for English football at pretty much every level of the game but perhaps that's better left for another time.
The FA, the founders of the competition have done very little to sustain its appeal throughout the 21st century. In 1999 the all-conquering, treble-winning Manchester United team boycotted the FA Cup in favour of playing in the inaugural World Club Championship, a Mickey Mouse competition derived by that other bastion of the game of football, FIFA. Critics might say that taking part in the FIFA competition was an attempt by United to broaden their fan base on an international level but actually the pressure for them to compete in the World Club Cup at the expense of appearing in the FA Cup came from the FA themselves who felt it would give England a better chance of hosting the 2006 World Cup. It didn't and England never came close to winning the bid to host the World Cup that year. Instead, the FA had cut the heart out of the very competition that it had created 130 years earlier. The Chairman of the Manchester United Supporters Club in 1999 probably sums it up best
In fact the FA's scheduling of the competition in general shows it's complete apathy towards sustaining the importance of the The Cup in the football calendar. Both Semi-Finals are now played at Wembley as opposed to neutral venues so that the FA can cream some more profit out of holding those matches at its home stadium. The chance to play at Wembley, the home of football, should be reserved to those who make the final and that's it. I'm sure that the FA can keep their coffers filled by scheduling another Take That concert at some point in the year while simultaneously satisfying the average Arsenal fans desire to visit the stadium more often - I hear they are big fans of boy bans in Woolwich.
<grammarly-btn>Even the final which has traditionally been the last game of the domestic season in England has been sold down the river by the FA to accommodate the Premier League. In 2011 Man City won their first domestic title for over 30 years (The FA Cup) while on the same day, Manchester United were winning the league title, further evidence that the cup's importance is being diluted. 2 years later, Wigan Athletic bucked the trend by beating the traditional big boys to claim the kind of victory that the FA Cup has become synonymous with over the years. However, with the EPL yet to complete its fixtures for the year Wigan returned for their last 2 league games and were promptly relegated from the top flight a few days later! The FA Cup final has drifted away from being the traditional showpiece of the season to nothing more than a footnote.
Why Scorum should embrace the FA Cup?
This weekend marks the start of the FA Cup proper with 1st round matches being played across the weekend for sides up to league 1 (the 3rd tier of English football). However, for some of the non-league/semi-pro sides that have made it this far the journey will have started back in August and will have involved coming through 6 qualifying matches. For these clubs reaching the 1st round proper is a massive deal and not only is it likely to be the club's biggest match of the season it could be it's biggest for a generation!
While we can complain that the Premier League has taken over mainstream media, we on Scorum have a chance to redress the balance to some extent by focusing on local, grassroots sides who while not being the kind of household names that are usually written about, do still have a good solid following across their immediate communities. We already have Jammerbugt FC, a side in the 3rd tier of Danish Football as an established presence on Scorum. We also have community members @kofpato & @jotmax organising a Scorum Africa football tournament that could pull in a lot of interest from local amateur or semi-pro sides from that part of the world. Writing and interacting about matches in the Premier League is important to the platform and will always generate a lot of traffic, hence the reason I started the EPL live blog series that sees in excess of 200 comments every weekend from football lovers around the world. However, tapping into the lower leagues and providing football fans from those clubs with a voice that they will never find within mainstream media is a fantastic opportunity to grow the popularity and appeal of Scorum.
Below is a club to watch out for in the 1st round of the FA Cup - I will be sending links of this blog onto them with the hope that maybe we get them to start creating the occasional blog on Scorum themselves.
Hitchin Town - The lowest ranked team left in the competition
The status as the lowest ranked team left in the competition is something of a badge of honor within the history of the FA Cup. The idea of the underdog overcoming all the odds and defeating a team that on paper they have no right to is what keeps footballing purists coming back to this great competition year after year.
<grammarly-btn>Hitchin Town play in the 7th tier of English football and judging by their position within that league (2nd from bottom at present) they may yet find themselves drifting further away from the big clubs at the top. Then again for many sides at all levels of the game that is the beauty of a cup competition. You can put to bed all the poor performances of the season so far, all the doom and gloom that surrounds the dressing room and so long as you can pull it together for just 90 minutes you could engineer a result that will have you remembered within the annals of a club's history forever!
Hitchin's game against Solihull Moors this Sunday also demonstrates the rich history that the FA Cup can provide. The venue for the match, Top Field, was also a ground used in the very first FA Cup back in 1871. Since then political parties have come and gone, the UK has fought Europe, joined Europe and is now leaving Europe and an entire Empire has risen and then crumbled into the sands of time and yet, football in Hitchin remains.....
Competitions like the FA Cup are very often the key to ensuring that clubs like Hitchin Town can continue to offer excitement and entertainment perhaps not on a global scale but at least to those in their local community who can bask in the club's 15minutes of fame. Good luck to Hitchen Town this Sunday!
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