sport news The Premier League is poisoning our game and their hand in having FA Cup ... trends now

The Premier League announced the scrapping of FA Cup replays on Thursday, although of course that is not how the elite club owners presented it. They do not like to be candid about their greed. 

They do not like to be honest about their disdain for the rest of the football pyramid, the eco-system that is the kernel of their success but which they are hell-bent on destroying.

So they tried to hide that part away. They told us that, actually, this was a good thing. They told us that they would be putting £33m more into grass roots football without saying that many multiples of that figure would be lost to grass roots football through the death of replays that are often the difference between profit and loss for lower league clubs.

The truth contained here is simple: the Premier League is killing the lower leagues by degrees. It is poisoning them. It is doing it gradually and with what it fondly imagines is a touch of stealth but it is poisoning them nonetheless. Don’t be fooled by the weasel words: this news poured another spoonful of arsenic down the throats of the smaller clubs.

The dead hand of the Premier League is all over this but the FA should be ashamed of its complicity in it, too. They are supposed to be the protectors of the whole of the English game but the way they have caved in to pressure from the Premier League, like fawning supplicants, is a sorry abrogation of their responsibility.

The joint press release from the two organisations was an exercise in clumsy, mallet-shaped propaganda, a doomed attempt to dress a wolf in lamb’s clothing, a futile effort to disguise yet another Premier League land-grab as an act of great beneficence. However unpleasant it may be, I would rather they were at least honest about what they are doing.

The reality is that the leading clubs would rather play a league game in Philadelphia or Shanghai – the long-held dream of the father of the Premier League, Richard Scudamore – than have an FA Cup replay. And we know that that dream is getting closer and closer to fruition. The abolition of replays clears that pathway of another obstacle, too.

Maybe we should admire their front. Maybe we should admire the way they dressed up the loss of one of English football’s great traditions as something to cheer and then added, for good measure, that once more, the final weekend of Premier League fixtures, not the FA Cup final, would be the climax of the domestic season. But if they think people don’t see through their bluster, they take us for fools.

‘Seven hundred and twenty-nine teams compete in the FA Cup,’ Nicola Palios, the highly-respected vice-chairman of Tranmere Rovers, wrote on X. ‘Why is its format being dictated by the Premier League, who represent circa 3 per cent of them? Why were EFL clubs not given a say?

‘Why is the Premier League even dictating whether replays are allowed in rounds they don’t participate in? Protest is needed. The FA and the Premier League have reached an agreement to suit themselves further at the expense of the rest of the football pyramid. Bring on the regulator and make sure it has some teeth before the Premier League strangle the pyramid.’

Palios is absolutely right. How can the Premier League do all of this with a straight face? Do they have absolutely no shame? How can they sit in their ivory tower, frittering away their television billions on ever-spiralling player wages, and saying they feel uneasy about agreeing a deal to give more money to help the lower leagues survive because some of the clubs are not viable?

How do they expect them to be viable when, little by little, bit by bit, mile by mile, they take away the life-blood of these clubs that are at the heart of our communities and then tell them it’s their fault

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