FA Cup Fifth Round weekend is upon us and eleven top-flight teams are among the last sixteen almost in the blink of an eye. That’s an illusion, of course. My team was knocked out of the Cup on 3rd August. But two wins for the top teams have put them in with a chance of doing something special in the finest football cup competition in the world.

Manchester United, Manchester City, Newcastle United and Aston Villa are among the Premier League teams fighting it out for a place in the last eight. Arsenal, Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur are not.

The Fifth Round can be instructive. For the highest ranked Premier League clubs, it’s decision time. Are they going to go for it in the Cup? What does going for it entail in their specific circumstances?

The FA Cup is in the midst of an identity crisis. It’s more than 150 years old and a history full of wear and tear has brought it to where it is today.

It bears little resemblance to the competition founded in 1871. Football itself is unrecognisable, for better and worse. Professionalism came along, then television, then the Premier League and Champions League, then the internet, then streaming.

All the while, football’s national and global popularity has inflated and evolved. The weight and meaning of the FA Cup have shifted faster in the last ten years than the ten before those and the twenty before those.

Even in the last year or two the FA Cup’s identity has been tested by new challenges. This week’s Fifth Round games still feel significant for every team involved, for various reasons. There’s no guarantee the same will be true in a year’s time.

The sad reality for advocates of the FA Cup is that it’s fractured along several fault lines and is very probably beyond any sort of meaningful repair.

There are too many conflicting interests and divided priorities, too much greed, for it to come together in a manner that makes sense for everybody.

That’s a problem. The FA Cup is everybody. Give or take the slightly frayed entry requirements and restrictions at the bottom end, it’s really the everybody that makes the FA Cup special.

The FA Cup is a game of two halves

‘The Magic of the FA Cup’ is a hideous phrase – a lazy, clichéd slogan that signposts a vague feeling about what the FA Cup is supposed to be but is only really used to attract television viewers to the second half of the competition, where matches have been moved to kick-off times that are as magical as a kick in the knackers.

Yet that feeling has some truth to it, even now. The Cup is a competition played in two connected parts – qualifiers and proper, early and late, little and big – and that’s a selling point its organisers and broadcasters continually misinterpret and misappropriate.

They rightly focus on the teams and stories that leap from one part of the FA Cup to the other and call them magical, but there’s surely also little sprinkling of stardust in the simple fact that nearly 700 non-league teams enter a contest every summer, 44 elite sides start another in January, and seldom the twain shall meet.

This is what makes the FA Cup and indeed English football unique. 745 clubs entered the competition in 2024/25 and that can’t happen anywhere else.

But that means zilch if the rules change in the middle of the season, and that’s where one of the most fundamental lines of division has emerged. The FA Cup final in May has never looked like the Extra Preliminary Round in August at an aesthetic level but they were until recently the same sport. That’s no longer the case.

This season is the first that has no FA Cup replays from the First Round Proper onwards, a shameful tugging of the forelock in the direction of the Premier League clubs.

Their abolition was widely criticised and much of that debate focuses on the television revenue lost or competitive potential gained by lower league or non-league clubs that eke out a draw with the big boys.

The mess it leaves behind in the late summer and autumn barely gets a mention. In the qualifying rounds of the FA Cup, non-league clubs do have to navigate replays.

These are the clubs least equipped to manage the additional games and also least likely to benefit from a lucrative second crack, not to mention the fact that lots of them were thrust into penalty shoot-outs in the first game of the 2020/21 season because they suddenly didn’t have replays.

The introduction of video assistant referees (VAR) in the FA Cup drew another uncrossable line between its two connected parts. The Fifth Round will be the first in this season’s competition to be marred by VAR and it will be inflicted on every tie.

That’s a welcome level of consistency within rounds, sure, but it’s a difference between one round and the next that damages the fabric of the competition.

The Premier League’s influence is a threat

That the FA Cup is at a crossroads in terms of its identity is a result of the formation and growth of the Premier League and Champions League.

Premier League clubs and their most vocal managers have too much say and too much sway when it comes to the FA Cup.

Manchester United often get blamed for eroding the competition’s prestige but in the quarter of a century since their usually over-simplified decision to withdraw there’s been a revolving cast of Premier League managers seeking to twist public opinion towards the idea that there are too many fixtures and the FA Cup is necessarily the competition that has to cede territory. Says who?

Making structural changes to appease a handful of clubs in a competition played by 745 at last count is some piping-hot bullshit, but the matches they do play are gradually taking the shine off Ol’ Big Ears in a way that can be more easily justified.

Many Premier League and EFL managers field weakened teams in the FA Cup and that, frankly, is their business. They have their priorities and goals. They have their squads to manage and if the FA Cup isn’t their number one target then that’s more about the Cup than it is about them.

Communicating that fact can be done with varying levels of respect but, ultimately, it’s up to them and they shouldn’t be criticised for that.

The impact on the overall prestige of the competition – its capacity for magic, if you must – is just part of the FA Cup’s crisis of identity in 2025.

The eternal scrap between the FA Cup’s past and future

In January, the Third Round of the FA Cup started on Thursday and ended on Tuesday.

There’s no functional need for any round to be played over a six-day weekend and tradition is automatically pitched into battle against modern interests as a result. A crisis of identity is therefore inevitable for a competition of the FA Cup’s longevity.

Television coverage and the money that comes with it dictate that 32 ties won’t be played at 3.00pm on the first Saturday of January. To demand that would be unrealistic but the current television deal is a triumph of new over old and that weakens the bonds that hold the competition together.

The FA Cup doesn’t have to adhere to a particular form or format to represent the soul of the English game; it needs to represent the soul of the English game or it isn’t really the FA Cup.

Tradition isn’t the be all and end all. English football has more depth and breadth and diversity today than ever before. The FA Cup can evolve and still be the encapsulation of English football’s sheer cultural heft.

It probably needs to do that now to escape from its own shadow and survive. Perfect adherence to tradition isn’t the answer.

Sadly, it might already be beyond effective reform. The FA Cup has become the central battleground in English football and might makes right. It’s going to get worse before it gets better and you’d better believe that’s going to hit harder in August than it does in January.

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