Fans of British football have been complaining about something for years, and just yesterday, over on the Scuffed Discord, someone made a brilliant suggestion to solve it. This is that story - and some details I’ve imagined on how it might work.
Background
So over in the UK, football fans are all aware of a few things. Skip these points if you’re already familiar, but if not, some background:
England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are (of course) all just administrative regions of the United Kingdom (the “home nations”), but for historical reasons, they each have their own Football Association, a quasi-governmental oversight body for the sport of football
In every country, the local FA runs an annual knockout tournament Cup competition, to supplement the competitive opportunities provided by the leagues. The English FA Cup is the oldest and most famous of these, but they all run them. And the FA Cup involves over 700 teams.
Because they provide a good chunk of the FA’s operating funds each year, the prize money for these competitions is poor. However, one aspect that makes them fun to watch is that they let lower-division teams compete against top teams, providing underdog stories and the occasional “giant-slaying” that becomes legend for some local semipro team.
Now, in England in particular (and in Scotland, and also France until last year), there is also a second annual cup competition, the EFL Cup, organized by and for the English professional leagues, which constitute the top 4 divisions of league play (i.e. the top 92 teams). This “League Cup” (or EFL Cup) was introduced before the Premier League became the money-printing machine it is, when clubs wanted to hold more midweek games, to take advantage of the advent of stadium lighting and televised games.
So What’s Wrong?
Well, several problems, which on the surface might not seem to intersect:
(1) Everyone kinda hates the League Cup. It might have made sense in the 60s and 70s, but today the EPL teams’ schedules are so stretched, and the money to be made for the additional matches to play the League Cup is so poor, that the big teams don’t want to bother and even the mid-size teams can’t win enough to make it worth their while anyway. More importantly, fans are unenthused - it’s not as prestigious as the FA Cup, there’s nothing that makes it special, and because the clubs mostly don’t take it seriously, there’s rarely reason to watch. People have consequently been talking about abolishing it for years, though the EFL itself makes decent money off of it.
(2) There is tremendous inequality throughout British football. The EPL’s “Big 6” have been runaway winners in the league’s growth to global preeminence, but lower divisions, and those of the other Home Nations, have been left in the dust without much prospect for sharing in that success.
The English Premier League is the richest association football league in the world, and prints money like crazy. In Scotland, the two big teams in Glasgow (Celtic and Rangers) are also huge and well-funded, and in Wales there are two teams (Swansea and Cardiff) capable of competing with the big English teams, and who occasional make it to the EPL… but other than that, most teams in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are not particularly well-funded or supported by the standards of big-league football. And there’s not much on the horizon that might offer them a boost, either.
(3) Fans would love to see some meaningful competition for clubs across these sub-national borders. Other than continental-level competitions for the very best clubs (The UEFA Champions League, and UEFA’s secondary competitions), the Home Nations’ clubs have no opportunities to play against each other. And this is a bit of a shame, since Rangers and Celtic beat up on everyone in Scotland but have no chances to really test themselves except against each other. Likewise Swansea and Cardiff are too big to even bother with the Cymru Premier (the Welsh league), and the Northern Irish teams are comparably tiny (average attendance is about 1,000).
That’s a ton of preamble, what’s the solution?
Easy: Let’s have a cup competition between clubs of all four Home Nations, and use it to replace the EFL Cup (and Scottish League Cup).
Why?
There’s now a much-improved “reason to watch” the competition, since it’s fundamentally different than the rest - you can root not just for your club but the club’s nation, and assess relative strength of each league, see more contrast in styles, new grounds and places for supporters to travel to, and so on.
It would spread a good bit of money down to the clubs and FAs who need it the most, i.e. those which haven’t been the winners of the EPL’s runaway success.
The travel would be easy - it’s all domestic, with short flights.
It doesn’t solve the schedule-congestion issue for the biggest clubs, but we can probably give them a bye through enough rounds to keep the grumbling to a dull roar.
It would nudge the remaining Welsh holdout clubs, like Wrexham, to join and reinforce the Welsh league, which has advanced rapidly from an iffy beginning 25 years ago. Many in Wales are salty about the big clubs playing in England.
The simple opportunity to rotate the home of the Cup Final between the national stadiums of the 4 nations would make it attractive as a novelty. Even if it’s Chelsea vs Manchester City for the title (again), this time it’s at Hampden Park! Or, Windsor Park in Belfast!
I’d certainly tune in.
Who?
The competition has to start with one basic principle: The Home Nations Cup will include all professional football teams in the four nations. We could leave the edge cases to the respective FAs or Leagues, but for the moment that likely includes these clubs:
In England, the 92 teams comprising the Premier League and EFL’s 3 divisions, inclusive of any Welsh clubs in the system.
In Scotland, the 22 teams in the SPFL’s top two divisions (the Scottish Premiership and Scottish Championship), which are fully professional - the SPFL’s lower-two divisions are only semi-pro, amid some controversy.
In Wales, the 12 teams of the Cymru Premier. Maybe they’re not all up to the standard required here, but it’s close and getting better.
In Northern Ireland, the 12 teams of the NIFL Premiership, which draw slightly better than the Welsh clubs and are rapidly professionalizing.
In the years it would take to plan and launch such a competition, the remaining Welsh and Northern Irish clubs that need to make higher-quality hybrid or 3G turf pitches on their grounds can do so, and increased interest would probably help spur some of the part-time clubs to go full-time.
How?
So the above list would give us 138 clubs. Let’s design the competition format for this sucker!
If we need to, we can add a few teams from the National League (England’s 5th division) or Scottish League One (3rd division), to make up the numbers. Maybe a few of the semi-pro clubs at the bottom of the Welsh or Northern Irish leagues decline to join the competition, or you have some standards that the grounds need to meet, and some don’t measure up. Let’s assume that any dropouts are replaced with National League or SPFL League One clubs, and keep it to that 138. Here’s how you could structure the competition:
First Round (52 teams):
10 Welsh teams (those not qualifying for UEFA competition last season)
8 Northern Irish teams (those not qualifying for UEFA competition last season)
10 Scottish Championship teams (second division)
24 teams from EFL League Two
Second Round (66 teams):
26 winners from First Round, plus -
2 Welsh teams (those in UEFA competition)
4 Northern Irish teams (those in UEFA competition)
10 Scottish Premiership teams (all except ahem those finishing top-two last season)
24 teams from EFL League One
Third Round (72 teams):
33 winners from Second Round, plus -
2 Scottish Premiership teams finishing top-two last season
24 teams from EFL Championship (top half of table, plus teams relegated to it)
13 teams from the English Premier League (those not qualifying for UEFA competition last season)
Fourth Round (36 teams): 36 winners from Third Round, only.
Fifth Round (18 teams): 18 winners from Fourth Round, only.
Sixth Round (16 teams):
9 winners from the Fifth Round, plus -
7 teams from the English Premier League which qualified for UEFA competition last season
Followed of course by Quarterfinals, Semifinals, Final. Note that this plan would enter the biggest clubs at the R16, one round later than the current structure of the EFL Cup, to throw them a bone in exchange for agreeing to this exotic scheme.
Who Wins?
So let’s just look at this structure for a sec:
The first two rounds give the leagues other than the top two English divisions a chance to play each other, play some different opponents, including those which might have really strong support bases that could travel and provide matchday revenue. Sunderland coming to town would be huge for them; they average 29k attendance. Bradford City in League Two averages 15k attendance.
The next three rounds, 3-5, introduce some pretty big clubs, up to and including a few of your Everton or Leicester types, and give Celtic and Rangers (plus those winning lower rounds) a chance to compete with them. You’d see Swansea and Cardiff here, so if any of the Welsh league entrants survive, they might well face them.
After that, you’re down to the Round of 16, you introduce the mega-clubs, and play for a trophy. It’ll probably be mostly EPL clubs plus an occasional Celtic / Rangers entrant at this point, but that’s fine, just the fact of them being there at the end of the rainbow should be enough to motivate interest. By this point in the season it should be February or early March, and some of those mega-clubs may be out of Europe and out of the FA Cup. If so, this will be their remaining shot to win hardware on the year, so they’re likelier to still take it seriously.
This largely gives something for everyone here. Every non-mega club gets to try themselves out at what should be a fair level of competition for them. Every fanbase can dream about playing giants, and for Scottish teams that means giants other than the two usual suspects. The Welsh teams can show that they deserve to have their clubs playing in England return home, and once in a while might get to play those teams themselves. What it offers is largely unchanged for lower English divisions (albeit with a bit more variety of opponents). And the mega-clubs knock a fixture off their list.
The arguable loser is the EFL itself, which was once organizer of a full cup competition but now is, at best, one of 4 co-organizers. But I suspect that as long as England’s share goes to the EFL rather than the FA - if it’s organized by the respective home-nation leagues rather than FAs - then they would end up getting a smaller share of a larger pie, and their cut might well end up being larger in the long run. It would certainly make for more-enjoyable negotiations with broadcasters, a better story to tell.
What Else?
So firstly, the competition structure above has a lot of variations you could make out of it. You could compress the whole competition one round by dropping the biggest EPL teams back to the round of 32, and then starting a few teams earlier. You could fix the drawing in early rounds so that clubs ranked X in last season’s league table play against a club roughly ranked X in their own league. But either way, I think you do need to preserve a few rules: non-English teams cannot be drawn against domestic league opponents, and English teams can’t be drawn against competitors in the same division (until and unless there are insufficient alternatives). Try to focus matchups on cross-league play.
One thing I don’t like about the FA Cup is the single-legged nature of the matches; feels unfair to one team’s home supporters, who might miss the chance for a much bigger club to come to town. I’d prefer something like this:
First two rounds are double-legged.
In the Third and Fourth rounds, both teams may agree to have the match be single-legged, on whatever terms they might choose, but if they don’t agree then it is double-legged, with home teams decided by seeding.
In the Fifth round and on, both teams may agree to have the match be double-legged, but if they don’t agree, it will be single-legged. If they do agree, they get to keep all the extra revenue and divide it on whatever terms they agree to.
So the clubs who most want fewer matches (the mega-clubs) can get that, and the clubs who most want a home match in each round can get that, and in the gray middle area, they haggle over it.
If, down the road, we want to take a more expansive view of this cup’s possibilities - perhaps add a goodwill vibe to the competition - we could eventually include the Republic of Ireland’s 10 Premier Division clubs too. The flight distance is just the same, no language barrier, etc. Competitively, while there’s fewer fully-professional teams, the UEFA league coefficient is in fact higher than that of Wales or Northern Ireland, owing to the (relative) European success of St Patrick’s and Shamrock Rovers. Broadcast rights might start getting a bit more complex though, and the competition’s name might be a bit politically charged, even 25 years after the Good Friday Accords. More substantively, though, the Irish league itself is a summer league, which adds scheduling constraints - can’t be playing meaningful matches in (say) February, if none of the clubs are operating in full swing. So maybe you’d start down this road by just adding a handful of full-time guest clubs, on an invitation basis.
Why Might This Suck?
There’s a couple hurdles here to get through, which we should just acknowledge. While I think this is a great idea, it’s not without risk.
Just general inertia and organizational overhead. You’d need two leagues to give up an existing competition (to create room on the calendar), and then like 200 different people and dozens of interest groups to all agree on something. Governance would be a mess - you’d need something like a 5-member E-Board where the EFL appoints 2 and each other league appoints 1. It’d make the European Union look harmonious, at least at first.
Dropping one round for mega-clubs is a nice gesture, but they really want to wipe out all of them (they average 2-3 each today). You’d have to accommodate with e.g. guaranteed home seeding, or other concessions - you simply couldn’t offer enough money to make it worth their while. Maybe you let a few of them skip every year, as long as any defending champion agrees to defend the title.
While some anecdotal evidence suggests the level of the Welsh league is comparable to that of the English National League, it’s entirely possible that both Cymru Premier and the NIFL Premiership are so bad that they get their butts handed to them by EFL League Two (to say nothing of higher levels). I think that’s unlikely - the payrolls are comparable among the fully-professional clubs, from what I can tell on brief inspection - but even if they do mostly lose, as long as they don’t get humiliated, I think in the long run it will help boost the profile, funding and support for the other leagues.
Leaving aside the skill of the teams, the pitches themselves might not be up to the task and turn some matches in farther-flung places into ugly slop-fests. Likewise, 4 Northern Irish clubs and 5 Welsh clubs lack stadiums with even a 3,000-seat capacity (a capacity exceeded by 6 of the 10 clubs in Scottish League One and 6/10 in League Two, both currently excluded from the competition). Not that the likes of Liverpool are going to end up traveling to remote parts of Northern Ireland, but even a Championship team might complain. The Welsh and NI FAs might need to take an advance on fees and make a grant program to invest in pitch and grounds improvements, and such corporate-welfare would be controversial to say the least.
Broadcasters might not care enough. A lot of contractual infrastructure has been built around the EFL Cup, it’s broadcast in like 50 countries - even Singapore is paying $20M / yr, and the main English broadcast on Sky is worth £80M / yr. Would they pay as much when they’re not as familiar with (or trusting of) several dozen new venues around Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland? Probably, I think. Eventually. The biggest thing that would hurt, honestly, is eliminating a round of play by the mega-clubs, who are of course the bulk of what they’re paying for. But compared to outright abolition of the League Cup, it’s still way better than going to zero.
The Scottish League Cup is in fact the oldest League Cup, dating to the 1940s, and some of those clubs might stand on that tradition to object to its replacement. Particularly so the lower two divisions (20 teams), who while not fully-professional clubs, are still voting members of the SPFL, and would lose a competition under this proposal.
The usual suspects would just end up winning the thing all the time again. But of course, that happens today in the League Cup as it is. And would continue to happen, unless you excluded the Premier League from the competition (which would slaughter your broadcast fees). So basically everyone else would need to go into this thing and realize they get something out of it other than a trophy.
While I think the appeal (to fans, and the money to clubs) would be strong, some of these could hold up a launch, particularly the first one. Alternatively, there are starter-grade versions of this plan that could be tried in the face of some persistent objections, such as the EFL just deciding to invite a bunch of particular (bigger) Scottish, NI and Welsh teams, to join and contest an enhanced EFL Cup, without the massive expansion the idea above presents. But the final say would really be had by the fans. If they’d flock to see Crawley Town play at Linfield in Belfast, or pack Millennium Stadium in Cardiff to see a League Cup final between two London clubs, then it’ll work, and the rest is mostly haggling.
I hope it does. The UK could do with a dose of unity and cross-nation cooperation in this post-Brexit world.