sport news As football chiefs get their snouts in the trough of the cash-spinning new ... trends now
One of the season’s most dispiriting conversations was with an executive at a Premier League club about plans for a 32-team summer World Club Cup that FIFA will launch with a tournament in America in summer 2025.
‘People can’t get enough of these big games between the top clubs,’ said he said with a smothering degree of self-regard.
‘They are better than all those boring FA Cup matches.’
This is where so many people at our top clubs miss the point. They mistakenly believe that what they feel and think in their money-saturated, cash-driven parallel universe automatically equates to what actual football supporters want or need. And it doesn’t.
This week we have seen details of next season’s expanded Champions League revealed. More games, more money. If you listen carefully, it’s possible to hear pigs’ trotters ploughing through the mud towards the trough.
The new Champions League threatens to squeeze England's domestic cups in the calendar
FIFA have also approved plans for the Club World Cup to be expanded to 32 teams from 2025
Doesn’t smell too good does it?
And now, at last, football’s gravy train has arrived at the particularly repugnant station it has been headed to for so long. From next season onwards there will be no FA Cup replays from the third round onwards.
Having been tugging at it for so long, the big clubs have now finally pulled the rug from under the feet of the clubs further down the food chain who value and treasure FA Cup exposure and income in a way alien to a Premier League awash with cash from TV and sponsorship.
These two developments are linked of course. It’s impossible to squeeze extra European games into the calendar without taking something out. Despite the lamentable standard at the bottom, the Premier League will never be tapered down to comprise fewer clubs and games. Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas.
So, depressingly and predictably, it’s the very fabric of our game that takes another snip, another hack at the hem. It’s a play as full of self-interest as it is of vanity.
Yet as the FA Cup prepares to take that hit the timing of this news is pertinent. For quarter-final weekend has arrived with three of our richest and most aspirational clubs clinging desperately to the hope that the dear old competition may yet save their season. Funny how sport works, eh?
Erik ten Hag, Mauricio Pochettino, Eddie Howe. How much money would you wager on all of them still being in work at Manchester United, Chelsea and Newcastle next season? Not a penny, I would imagine.
Ten Hag may well be walking in dead man’s shoes already. Pochettino cannot get a regular tune from his players while those who feel Howe is safe in the north-east probably need a quick refresher course on how sportswashing works. Gulf states don’t buy football clubs to move slowly and methodically. And they certainly don’t buy them to move backwards.
Erik ten Hag's Man United and Mauricio Pochettino's Chelsea are both in FA Cup action
Pressure is mounting on Newcastle boss Eddie Howe after their underwhelming campaign
Yet the FA Cup is here and suddenly it offers opportunity. Opportunity to make a statement with a big performance – United host Liverpool while Newcastle are at Manchester City – and opportunity to reach a Wembley semi-final and then after that who really knows?
And this is what so many people at the top of the English game are reluctant to understand until they wake up one morning and the fact they are eleventh in the Premier League and going nowhere smacks them in the face. Victories and trophies. They remain the most valuable currency of all.
So of course the big clubs purport not to care about the FA Cup very much. It doesn’t even make them that much money.
So they field under strength teams in the early rounds and they talk it down and belittle it and talk big about it being a competition for the smaller clubs.
But then Wembley looms in to view and they realise that, out there on the
