With my deepest apologies, it’s time to have The Conversation again. We do it most years, although often it’s the FA Cup that bears the brunt of the desire for change. Scrapping replays, keeping apart Premier League teams, pushing for a greater spread of prize money from the winners and finalists (to whom it typically matters little) to the earlier rounds when it matters a great deal; you’ve probably heard them all. This time it’s the turn of the EFL Cup to be stared at pointedly.
On some – OK, on just about every – level, daring to suggest that any historic English competition requires systemic change is translated as cowering towards the country’s richest clubs. To them, the theory goes, the EFL Cup provides nothing more than a series of irksome dates on the calendar. At best, it is the home of the academy graduate who shines and then immediately returns to Under-23 football. If they’re lucky, they may make the bench the following weekend.
And so we assumed that the EFL Cup’s passing would begin from the top down, big clubs deciding that they no longer needed nor wanted the competition and thus devaluing its PR to the point of suffocation. In fact, almost the opposite. Look at the recent winners: since 2004, only Birmingham City and Swansea City came from outside the so-called Big Six; that’s fewer than the FA Cup over the same timeframe. Manchester City have won five of the last six finals. Two non-top-flight teams have reached the final in two decades. The EFL Cup no longer even provides a route into prestigious continental competition for the winners; now it’s Europa Conference League football only.
This midweek, nine Premier League sides played against EFL clubs. Their victory in all nine fixtures was not especially striking, but the margin of those victories was: An 8-0, three 6-0s, a 4-0 – four of those five away from home. The aggregate scoreline across the nine games was 40-2.
That series of embarrassing mismatches was fuelled by an uncomfortable truth: EFL managers don’t much care for the League Cup either. Its early rounds have become a reserve team vs reserve team competition. Forest Green made six changes for their trip to Brentford. Nottingham Forest made 10 to face Wolves. Newport County, who might have fancied unsettling Southampton’s ‘B’ team in the tight confines of Rodney Parade, made six changes and lost 8-0. When reserves meet reserves, the vast gap is more painfully apparent than when first team meets first team.
You can see the point of those managers who did rest regular starters. The FA Cup is played at weekends, replacing the typical league schedule. The EFL Cup is sandwiched between weekend matches and EFL managers know where their priorities lie. Heavy defeat in a cup competition to a Premier League team will not cost them their job; poor form in the league, exacerbated by fatigue and muscle injuries that competitive midweeks risk, might.
There are radical options: remove all the teams who will compete in European competition, make it an EFL-only trophy (and disband the Checkatrade Trophy) while retaining the Conference League qualification, scrap the EFL Cup entirely to ease the calendar, copy cricket’s Hundred format by playing five-a-side matches and finishing the whole competition in triple-quick time while alienating your existing fanbase.
But there is a financial issue at play here. It doesn’t involve prize money (the EFL Cup winners only receive £100,000 compared to £1.8m for the FA Cup winners). Matchday revenue isn’t the kicker either, because EFL supporters also consider the competition to be secondary. As an example, Huddersfield Town faced Everton at home, have been absent from the stadium for the last 18 months and tickets were priced at £15 for adults; their attendance was still two-thirds of the total of their last home league game. At Forest, the crowd on Tuesday was 40 per cent of their average league attendance; again prices were reduced.
Instead it boils down, and the romantic phrase really trips off the tongue, to the reliance upon broadcasting revenue. The EFL Cup is an integral part of the broadcasting deal between Sky and the EFL. Any change to the competition – and certainly its cancellation – would impact upon that deal at a time when that revenue is needed most.
Could EFL clubs negotiate a similar package without it? Could they urge Premier League clubs to share a percentage of their pot to match the same revenue on the basis that managers of those clubs would appreciate the added rest, may well fill those midweeks with added Champions League fixtures if that expansion goes ahead and rely upon the development of players in the EFL as part of their recruitment? Maybe. But they would also be resistant to change without it.
But then that presents its own depressing reality: It sells the EFL Cup as a competition simply existing for its own sake – those clubs who no longer want it still desperately need it. “Que sera sera, whatever will be will be, we’re scared of fiscal calamity.”
Perhaps we are looking at this all wrong. The yawning – and growing – gap between English football’s haves and have-nots has been exacerbated by Covid-19. The EFL Cup has lost its lustre through modern’s football’s mantra of ‘More is More’, an emphatic prioritisation of quantity over quality. It is a symptom of the problem rather than part of the disease. But then the disease has engulfed too much of the whole to scale it back now, however glum that makes you feel.
Either way, there is a significant danger – if indeed it hasn’t happened already – that the League Cup becomes an unwelcome distraction for the 72 as well as the top 20. Their chance of success has never been lower and the rewards for unlikely glory have gone the same way. The conversation about England’s second domestic trophy provokes few pleasant or easy answers, but it has also never felt more relevant.
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/2WuOlQQ
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