Long ago, deep in the mists of time, England would come to a standstill on a May afternoon for the FA Cup final. It was by far the biggest game of the season, and TV offered devoted, dawn-to-dusk coverage.
Helicopters would follow the teams to Wembley almost like a state occasion, a day on which the glamour trophy every club craved was won and lost. A crowd of exactly 100,000 wearing rosettes — this was so long ago that replica shirts had not yet been invented — would gather at the iconic national stadium, where the lush, manicured green surface contrasted starkly with the mud heaps on which most league matches were played up until the year 2000.
Those old finals entered football folklore, and by the time the TV, radio and newspapers had finished, the nation knew the life story of every player and what they had eaten for breakfast that morning. So how has the oldest and most famous domestic cup competition in the world been allowed to fall into such a sad state, with many Premier League managers treating it as a sideshow played out in half-full stadiums?
In the 1970-71 season, crowds to watch the FA Cup went over 3 million in total for the competition, with packed houses up and down the country. Those attendances have dropped by nearly 50% over the past half-century; it’s hard to escape the conclusion that fans, seeing the kind of depleted lineups that many top-flight clubs put on the pitch, are saying “well, if you don’t care too much about this competition, why should we?”
It feels as though the “magic” of the cup has become a myth. It is still there for teams from the lower divisions, for whom the prize money and potential fees for live TV coverage can by a lifesaver, but for Premier League teams, such money pales by comparison to the vast riches that can be earned just by staying in the Premier League.
For public consumption, managers pay lip service to the competition at their news conferences, but their team selections tell a different story.
