Financially, the FA Cup is an also-ran and has lost much of its appeal to the top clubs, writes barrister and Fulham season ticket holder JAMES McDERMOTT

SUCCESS IN football, as in life, is a relative concept. Former Liverpool manager Bob Paisley once observed: “Mind you I’ve been here during the bad times too – one year we came second.” One imagines that Paisley would have mixed feelings about a Cup final being contested between a Liverpool team 34 points off the pace in the title race and a Chelsea team whose most notable contribution to the season to date has been their successful adoption of the 9-0-0 tactical formation.

Having spent much of my childhood in Harrow it was perhaps inevitable I would develop a fascination with the FA Cup played a couple of miles away at Wembley particularly as television coverage of it often began at breakfast time. But now as I prepare to attend the final for the first time I wonder has it become an event in terminal decline?

A generation ago the FA Cup final was without question the most important annual domestic football match in the world. Twenty years on, with Arsenal hoping to secure Champions League qualification when they host Norwich at lunchtime on Saturday, it is entirely possible that the Cup final is not even the most significant football match taking place in London that day.

It is hard to think of any other major sporting event whose importance has diminished as steeply as that of the FA Cup with the majority of the wounds being self inflicted.

The most unforgivable damage was caused in 2000 when the FA pressurised Manchester United into pulling out of their own competition to travel to Brazil to participate in the inaugural World Club Championship in the vain hope of earning enough brownie points off Fifa to be chosen as host nation for the 2006 World Cup.

By convincing their reigning champions that defending the Cup was merely an optional extra the FA lost the moral authority to stamp out the now endemic practice of clubs fielding under strength teams in the early rounds in the hope of avoiding the fixture congestion that progressing in the competition might bring.

Indeed resting players has now become such a habit that it is likely that Chelsea’s team selection will largely be influenced on ensuring game time for those players suspended for the upcoming Champions League final.

Equally indefensible is the timing of the match. Traditionally contested on the Saturday after the conclusion of the league programme, the FA Cup final acted as the full stop of the domestic football season. Now it barley acts as a comma, taking place with two rounds of Premiership fixtures still to be played.

With the two Manchester clubs continuing to engage in a slow bicycle race towards the Premiership title the weekend’s headlines will be dominated more by Manchester City’s visit to Newcastle than by the events at Wembley. Most sacrilegiously of all the kick-off time has been moved from its traditional 3pm slot to 5.15pm to satisfy the whim’s of television schedulers keen to build up an audience for Britain’s Got Talent later that evening.

Concerns about public order have also drained much of the remaining drama out of the competition. For policing reasons replays now must take place a full 10 days after the original fixture when the interest generated by it has cooled down considerably. Worse still multiple replays have been abolished meaning that the four game epic struggles between Arsenal and Liverpool in 1980 and Arsenal and Leeds in 1991 can never be replicated.

Most illogical of all, though, is the requirement that both the semi-finals and final must be decided on the day. This overlooks the fact that the greatest FA Cup final goal of all time was scored on a Thursday night in 1981 by Ricardo Villa of Spurs who the previous Saturday had left the field in tears following his early substitution. The artificially-created excitement of a penalty shootout is a poor replacement for such drama.

Whatever progress the competition has made is purely reflected on its balance sheet as it retains an extraordinary ability to generate revenues in inverse proportion to its quality. The achievement of reaching the Wembley final is greatly devalued now that, for financial reasons, both semi-finals are also played there.

Worse still, the competition that for years considered itself such a national treasure so as to be above corporate support is now sponsored by an American beer company even though it still rather preciously attempts to distance itself from its own sponsor by insisting on being referred to as ‘the FA Cup with Budweiser’ rather than ‘the Budweiser FA Cup’. This habit of viewing the competition as a cash-cow runs through the entire tournament.

From Hereford right through to Sutton United the most cherished memories generated by the FA Cup were the so called ‘giant- killings’ where a top division side would be knocked out by a team from a lower division, invariably at the latter’s home ground. Nowadays when a non-league team is drawn to host a Premiership side their reflex reaction is to concede home advantage in return for the increased gate money generated by switching the tie to their opponents ground.

Maybe my belief that the FA Cup was better in the past is based on the nostalgic belief that everything was better in one’s childhood. And in truth it was always a competition with a tendency towards self-importance perhaps best illustrated in 1985 when Kevin Moran’s sending off sparked days of debate regarding whether or not he should be stripped of his winner’s medal. But it was also a competition that mattered.

Brian Clough masterminded a struggling, provincial Nottingham Forest side with no previous record of success to a league championship followed by two back- to-back European Cups, a feat that not even Pep Guardiola’s mighty Barcelona could equal. But following a lifetime in management Clough’s greatest regret was his failure to win the FA Cup, a trophy he recognised as being one of the glittering prizes of the English game.

Now teams would much rather finish second, third or fourth in the Premiership than emerge victorious at Wembley. When being runner-up outranks winning sport itself is the real loser.