Chelsea and FA Cup replays: Risks of well-intentioned but unnecessary games

Chelsea barely held off an FA Cup replay against Hull City. While fans enjoy some banter at Liverpool’s expense, Chelsea should join the Premier League replayees in calling for an end to this burden.

Games played for good causes can have very negative outcomes. Chelsea should know this as much as any club. Ruben Loftus-Cheek played his last competitive game on May 12, 2019. Three days later he ruptured his Achilles tendon during the “Final Whistle on Hate” game against the New England Revolution. Maybe the transatlantic travel combined with short recovery time made him more vulnerable to injury; maybe the Major League Soccer pitch was Major League Soccer quality; or maybe it was just one of those things where every game carries a degree of risk and this was the game where the risk becomes reality. Chelsea did not need to play that game at that time at that location. Nor did Loftus-Cheek, and his career is once again closer to “what could have been” instead of “what a player.”

Jurgen Klopp does not need Liverpool’s vaunted data science team to know (a) that the injury odds are increasingly not in his favour, and (b) what Liverpool stands to lose from playing a replay is incomparably greater than what they could gain.

Jose Mourinho and Ralph Hasenhuttl, the other Premier League managers playing an FA Cup replay, surely agree, as neither wanted one. But since their teams are playing each other, they do not have an opponent who can be cast as the sympathetic victim of the mega-clubs’ self-interest, so we hear much less about their perspectives.

Frank Lampard has already spoken about the need to reduce the number and density of games in the season, particularly this part of the season.

It’s not a huge assumption to think most other Premier League manager, especially those who are or were in European competitions, agree. They all face the same issues of managing fatigue, playing with minimal recovery and training, balancing rotation with season goals, and dealing with a record-high number of injuries over the festive period.

As we wrote recently about UEFA’s plans to add more games to the Champions League group stage, increases in the number and severity of injuries and a decrease in the quality of play are the foreseeable, predictable and inevitable consequences of adding more games to the year, especially when those games fall between November and February. It doesn’t matter whether those games are against Inter Milan or Shrewsbury Town.

Shrewsbury Town certainly make a more doleful protagonist, but only if you apply the same raw financial utilitarianism that many in the pro-replay camp use to condemn Premier League and Champions League regulars.

The prevailing argument for FA Cup replays is the financial windfall another game against a top team provides to the lower-tier club, especially if the replay is at the larger team’s stadium. The magic of the FA Cup is secondary to how the lower-tier club can use that money to upgrade the bathrooms at their ground or buy an otherwise out-of-reach player. The money grab is an ethical imperative when it’s done by the have-not, just as the equivalent money grab at a larger level is damning evidence against the higher-tier club.

Chalk up a parallel between football and politics: modern-day populism in both is a battle between tribes justifying their preferred plutocrats.

The pro-replay crowd among fans of lower-tier clubs may be even more cynical than all that.

Last season Shrewsbury Town played 59 games across League One, the EFL Trophy, the EFL Cup and the FA Cup. That’s comparable to what Chelsea played across their four competitions.

Arguing that “we do it, therefore you should do it” implies that either lower-tier clubs are more cavalier about injuries to their players than are higher-tier clubs, or it panders to the lazy stereotype of highly physical, minimally skillful lower-tier football, compared to the delicate style of play found on Premier League and Champions League pitches. Yes, the quality of play is lower in the lower tiers (“Duh.” – B. Eilish). But those fans celebrate when one of their players makes his way up the pyramid. They don’t consider him a sell-out or suddenly think he’s gone soft and pampered. They clearly value the skills that define top tier players.

Acting like the quality of play won’t be affected – or that fans don’t care of it is – by overloading the players sells short their abilities and reduces the fans to their own lazy stereotype of pie-and-ale philistines.

Partisans reducing their affinity groups to lazy stereotypes in order to “own” the other side? Chalk up one more parallel.

Football is one of the very few areas where I will say there is an inequality problem that needs to be addressed. That is solely because of the effects of ownership groups, and since I am a Chelsea fan, I’ll let the moral high horse pass me by. If the Football Association is to mean anything as an association, there should be mechanisms in place to let Shrewsbury Town, Bury, Bolton and the like benefit from the success of those at the top. FA Cup replays superficially fill this purpose, but at a risk that outstrips the short-term financial benefit.

For those lower-tier clubs to benefit, their players cannot be the pawns any more than the players from Liverpool, Tottenham, Southampton or – but for the grace of a Fikayo Tomori goal – Chelsea.