Carabao Cup Format Explained: Rounds, Byes and Rules
The Carabao Cup format explained for English football fans - which clubs enter at which round, the European byes, the regional draw and the two-legged semi.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Domestic Cups19 min read
- Clubs entered
- 92
- Rounds
- 7
- First season
- 1960/61
- Final venue
- Wembley Stadium
Seventy-odd ties on two warm evenings in August, most of them in front of crowds a third the size of a league Saturday, and by the last weekend of February somebody has lifted a trophy at Wembley. That compression is the whole character of the EFL Cup. It is the shortest route in English football from a Tuesday night at a League Two ground to a major final, and the reason it feels so different from the FA Cup is not the prestige gap that gets talked about but the calendar.
All 92 clubs in the Premier League and the English Football League enter. None of them may decline. Where a club comes in, though, depends on what else it is doing that season, and the entry structure is the part that confuses people most, because it flexes from year to year while the rounds themselves stay put.
What follows is the mechanism. Entry points, the European byes, the north and south draw, the tie-breaking sequence, the odd two-legged semi-final, the money, and the ten different names the thing has carried.
Which clubs enter, and at which round they come in
The entry list is simply the four divisions that sit above the National League. Twenty Premier League clubs, and 24 each in the Championship, League One and League Two.
Membership is what qualifies a club, not form. A side promoted out of the National League in May enters the following August; a side relegated into it drops out on the same day. There is no qualifying competition and no route in from below, which is the biggest structural difference between this competition and the FA Cup, where a club two or three steps down the non-league pyramid can start in August and still be alive in November. The pyramid's shape and the way clubs move up and down it is set out in the guide to the English football pyramid.
Nor do academy sides enter. Under-21 teams from category one academies play in a different EFL competition altogether, alongside League One and League Two first teams, and that arrangement is covered in the page on the EFL Trophy. It is worth keeping the two apart, because the presence of Premier League youth sides in one and their absence from the other is a frequent source of confusion.
The structure is designed backwards from the third round. Thirty-two clubs have to be standing when the competition goes national, and everything before that exists to produce them. Work forward from 92 and the arithmetic rarely divides cleanly, which is why the earlier rounds are not the same size every year.
- 92Clubs entered
- 7Rounds to win it
- 2Semi-final legs
- 8Matches a round-one entrant must win
Structural figures that hold from season to season. The entry point of individual clubs does move.
That last figure catches people out. Seven rounds, but eight matches, because the semi-final is played twice.
The European byes, and the arithmetic they force
Clubs in UEFA competition that season do not play in August. They are held back to the third round, which is staged after the European campaign has begun and slots into a week that is not already committed.
This is a scheduling accommodation rather than a reward. Nothing in it protects a strong club from a hard draw; it prevents a fixture list that already has European away trips in it from also carrying a first-round tie on a Tuesday in the second week of the season. The number of clubs involved changes with how many places English football is allocated in the UEFA competitions, and that allocation is itself variable, so the size of round one and round two moves accordingly. The route into Europe from the domestic season is explained in the guide to European qualification from the Premier League.
When the numbers do not divide, the EFL fills the gap with byes. A handful of League clubs are given a free pass into round two so the round has an even number of ties. Which clubs receive them has been decided by different methods over the years, including by draw, and it is one of the quietly irritating features of the competition for a club that fancied a home tie in August and did not get one.
The honest position on the exact figures is that they are a moving target. In a season with seven English clubs in Europe the first round will look one way; with eight or six it looks another. Anyone who tells you the first round always contains a specific number of ties has not checked more than one season.
Why a bye is not the same thing as a seeding
Seeding keeps strong clubs apart. A bye does nothing of the kind, and the third round is where that becomes obvious: a club that has sat out August can be drawn away to a League Two side that has already won two ties, and it happens every year. The competition has never seeded any round, in the way that the FA Cup has never seeded any round, and both governing bodies have resisted proposals to introduce it.
There is a real advantage in the bye, but it is not the one supporters complain about. It is rest, and the removal of two fixtures from a September and October that will already contain European travel. A Premier League club entering at round three has played perhaps ten competitive matches. A League One club it meets may have played eighteen. Over a season that gap matters more than a favourable pairing would.
- Round oneEFL clubs play single matches in August, drawn in northern and southern sections.
- Round twoWinners join the Premier League clubs not involved in Europe, still drawn regionally.
- Round threeThe clubs in UEFA competition enter, the draw goes national, 32 clubs remain.
- Round fourSixteen clubs, eight ties, played in the autumn.
- Quarter-finalEight clubs left, one match each, staged before Christmas.
- Semi-finalFour clubs, home and away over two legs, normally in January.
- FinalOne match at Wembley Stadium, traditionally on a Sunday at the end of February.
The structure of the rounds. Which clubs enter where changes with the number of English sides in European competition.
Why rounds one and two are drawn north and south
Regionalisation is the most old-fashioned thing about the competition and the most defensible. For the first two rounds the EFL divides the entrants into a northern section and a southern section and draws each separately, so a League Two club from Cumbria cannot be sent to Devon on a Tuesday night in August.
The reason is money, and it is not a small amount of it. A midweek tie played 300 miles from home costs a lower-division club a coach, a hotel in some cases, and a share of the wages of everybody who travels, and it earns them nothing at the gate because the receipts belong to the home club. Take away the regional split and the early rounds would produce a handful of ties that lose money for one of the two clubs before a ball is kicked.
The split is drawn on geography rather than division, and the line does not sit in the same place every year, because the make-up of the four divisions changes. Clubs in the Midlands are the ones most likely to find themselves shifted from one section to the other between seasons.
There is a cost to it. The northern section in particular can produce the same local pairings repeatedly, and supporters who have watched their club drawn against the same neighbour three Augusts running have a fair complaint. The counter-argument is that a derby in round one puts a bigger crowd in the ground than a randomly drawn tie against a club nobody has any feeling about, and gate receipts in August are exactly what the smaller entrants need.
From round three the regional split disappears entirely and the draw is open. That is the moment the competition stops being a League tournament and starts being a national one.
One night, no replay, and the shootout that arrives early
Every tie except the semi-final is a single match. There are no replays, and there have not been for a long time, which means a Tuesday night at a lower-division ground either produces a giant-killing or does not, with nothing carried forward.
The tie-breaking sequence has been amended, and this is where a lot of stale information circulates. From 2018/19 the EFL removed extra time from the earlier rounds, so a tie level after ninety minutes goes directly to a penalty shootout. The final retains extra time. The reasoning was partly player load and partly broadcast: a midweek match that finishes at twenty past ten fits a schedule in a way that one finishing at five to eleven does not.
The shootout itself follows the procedure in the Laws of the Game, with one notable exception in the competition's history. In 2017/18 the EFL trialled the so-called ABBA sequence, in which the order of kickers alternates in pairs rather than strictly turn and turn about, on the theory that the side kicking second is at a measurable disadvantage under the conventional order. It was tried, it confused nearly everybody watching, and it was dropped. The detail of how extra time and shootouts work across the English cups is set out in the guide to extra time and penalties in cup ties.
One consequence of the no-replay, no-extra-time structure deserves stating plainly: it makes the competition more random than the FA Cup, and deliberately so. A League Two side that can defend for ninety minutes and take five penalties has a genuine route past a Premier League team. Over 120 minutes the gap in fitness and squad depth tends to reassert itself. The EFL did not scrap extra time in order to produce upsets, but it has produced them.
What the change did to how the last ten minutes are played
Watch a round-two tie between clubs of different sizes and the difference from the old rules is visible in the substitutions. Under the previous regulations a manager kept something back for the extra half hour. Now there is nothing to keep back, so the bench empties earlier and the closing stages are played at a pace that a Tuesday night in September did not use to see.
The smaller club's calculation changed too. Holding out for ninety minutes used to buy you thirty more minutes of holding out. Now it buys you a shootout, in which a goalkeeper who has already made six saves has a fair chance of making two more. Several managers at that level have said openly that they set up for penalties from kick-off, which would once have been an odd thing to admit and is now simply the arithmetic of the competition.
The two-legged semi-final, and how it differs from the FA Cup
Four clubs, two matches each, usually a fortnight apart in January. It is the only round in the competition played home and away, and it is a direct survival from the original design, when the whole tournament was contested over two legs including the final.
The effect on the competition is considerable. A single-tie semi-final is a coin toss weighted towards the better side; a two-legged one gives the better side 180 minutes to prove it, and it very largely does. Upsets in this competition happen in rounds two, three and four. They are much rarer in January.
Away goals no longer break a level aggregate. They did for many years, which produced some strange second legs in which a club leading on aggregate defended a scoreline it could lose without conceding, and their removal has made the second leg simpler to follow. A tie still level after the second leg is decided on the night.
Contrast this with the FA Cup, where both semi-finals have been played at Wembley since the stadium reopened, on neutral ground, in a single match, with the draw made after the quarter-finals. The mechanics of that draw are covered in the page on how FA Cup draws are made. The two competitions reach their finals by quite different routes, and the League Cup's is the older one.
There is a scheduling argument against two legs that gets louder every few years. January is congested, the semi-finalists are usually clubs also involved in Europe and the FA Cup, and two extra matches in that month is a real cost. The counter is that the two legs are among the best-attended and best-watched nights the competition has, and a club that has reached a semi-final would generally rather have two of them than one.
The final, and the finals before Wembley
The first final, in 1961, was played over two legs. Rotherham United won the first leg 2-0 at Millmoor and Aston Villa won the second in extra time to take the trophy on aggregate. Nobody at the time thought of it as a showpiece, because it was not one.
That changed in 1967, when the final moved to Wembley and the winners were offered a place in European competition, conditional in the early years on the club being in the First Division. The first Wembley final is one of the best there has been. Queens Park Rangers, then a Third Division club, were 2-0 down to West Bromwich Albion at half-time and won 3-2. Two years later Swindon Town, also of the Third Division, beat Arsenal 3-1 after extra time on a pitch that had been churned to mud by the Horse of the Year Show.
The European place did more than raise the profile. Several First Division clubs had simply declined to enter during the competition's first years, treating it as an unnecessary extra fixture, and full entry only became the norm once there was something at the end of it worth having. The place has moved between UEFA competitions as those competitions have been restructured, and how it passes down the table when the winners have already qualified is set out in the page on the Carabao Cup European place.
Between 2001 and 2007, while Wembley was being rebuilt, the final was played at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff, alongside the FA Cup final and the play-off finals. It has been back at Wembley since. The traditional slot is the last Sunday in February, which puts it earlier in the season than any other domestic final and gives a winning club something to look at for three months while everybody else is still playing for things. If you are going, the practical guidance for the ground is in the Wembley Stadium visitor guide, and the other great Wembley occasion in the English calendar is covered in the play-off final at Wembley.
Rotation, academy debuts and the full-strength rule
The competition's reputation for weakened teams is older than most people assume, and so is the rule that is supposed to prevent it. EFL regulations require clubs to field a full-strength side in the competition, and clubs have been charged under that provision.
The difficulty is definitional. A Premier League club with a squad of 25 senior professionals can make nine changes and still field eleven internationals, and no disciplinary process has found a satisfactory way of saying that is a weakened team while a Championship club making four changes is not. Enforcement has therefore been sporadic and has tended to focus on the extreme cases rather than the routine ones. The whole argument, across both cups, is worked through in the guide to weakened teams in the domestic cups.
What the rotation actually produces is worth more than the complaints about it. This is the competition in which a substantial proportion of English academy graduates make a senior debut, in front of a real crowd, against opposition that is trying to win. A first-team debut in a round-two tie in Rotherham is a different and more useful experience than a hundred under-21 fixtures, and the clubs know it. The system that produces those players is explained in the page on the EPPP academy system.
There is also a competitive point that the sneering misses. A Premier League club that rotates heavily and loses in round three has been beaten by a side picked to win. That is not the competition being devalued. That is the competition working.
What a cup run is actually worth to a club
The League Cup has never had a headline prize fund of the kind the FA Cup carries, and the money in it works differently.
The main income from an individual tie is the gate. A lower-division club drawn at home to a Premier League side in round three can put more people through the turnstiles in one night than it manages in five league matches, and for clubs at that level a single such tie can be the difference between a break-even season and a difficult one. The away support alone is worth having: a Premier League club's allocation fills a stand that is normally half empty.
Broadcast money comes on top, through facility fees for selected matches. Because the competition's television deal is smaller than the Premier League's, the fees are smaller too, but they are paid to clubs that need them far more, which is a reasonable defence of the whole arrangement. How the largest of the English broadcast pots is divided is set out in the guide to Premier League TV rights money, and the FA Cup's separate round-by-round payments are covered in FA Cup prize money.
For the clubs at the top, the financial prize is the European place, and it is not a small one. A season in continental competition brings participation money, match fees and a share of a market pool, and for a club outside the usual qualifiers it can be transformative. That is the mechanism, and I am deliberately not putting a figure on it, because UEFA's distribution changes with each commercial cycle and any number quoted here would be wrong within two years.
None of which is why most clubs want to win it.
How a lower-division board actually treats the draw
Clubs at the bottom two divisions do not budget for a cup run, because a run cannot be relied on. What they budget for is round one, and anything after that is treated as unbudgeted income to be allocated when it arrives.
The order of preference is not always what an outsider would guess. A home tie against a Premier League club in round three is the jackpot, obviously. Below that, a home tie against a well-supported Championship club is frequently worth more than an away tie against a bigger name, because the away club's allocation fills the terrace and the home club keeps the receipts. Some clubs would genuinely rather draw a neighbour they can beat than a giant they cannot, since two home ties beat one glamorous defeat.
The other consideration is the pitch. An August tie played on a surface laid three weeks earlier, against opposition who will pass the ball, is a groundsman's problem for the rest of the autumn. That is a real cost and it does not appear in any published account.
Ten names in six decades
The competition has been renamed more often than any other major English tournament, and the sequence is a decent short history of British sponsorship.
| Era | Name | Sponsor |
|---|---|---|
| From 1960/61 | Football League Cup | None |
| From 1981/82 | Milk Cup | National Dairy Council |
| From 1986/87 | Littlewoods Challenge Cup | Littlewoods |
| From 1990/91 | Rumbelows Cup | Rumbelows |
| From 1992/93 | Coca-Cola Cup | Coca-Cola |
| From 1998/99 | Worthington Cup | Worthington |
| From 2003/04 | Carling Cup | Carling |
| From 2012/13 | Capital One Cup | Capital One |
| 2016/17 | EFL Cup | None |
| From 2017/18 | Carabao Cup | Carabao |
The Milk Cup deal in 1981 was the first title sponsorship of a major English football competition, and it was contentious at the time in a way that is hard to reconstruct now. The Football League had to negotiate with broadcasters who were reluctant to say the sponsor's name on air, which is why older highlights packages sometimes refer to it as the League Cup throughout.
Rumbelows, an electrical retailer, is the name that dates the competition most precisely. The chain closed in the mid-1990s. Its two seasons on the trophy are a small monument to a kind of high-street business that no longer exists.
Supporters have largely ignored all of it. Ask around any ground in England and a substantial number of people still call it the League Cup, which after ten names is probably the sensible position.
Winners and finalists from outside the elite
The roll of honour is more varied than the competition's reputation suggests, and the interesting entries are not the multiple winners.
Rochdale reached the final in 1962 from the Fourth Division and lost over two legs to Norwich City, who were themselves a Second Division club. That final remains the only major English final contested by two clubs from outside the top flight. Queens Park Rangers won it from the Third Division in 1967 and Swindon Town did the same in 1969.
Norwich came back and won it in 1985, beating Sunderland 1-0 in a final settled by a deflected own goal, after which both finalists were relegated from the First Division in the same season. Oxford United won it in 1986, in the club's first season at that level. Luton Town beat Arsenal 3-2 in 1988 with two goals from Brian Stein and a saved penalty in the closing stages. Sheffield Wednesday, in the Second Division at the time, beat Manchester United 1-0 in 1991 through a John Sheridan volley.
Later on, Middlesbrough's win in 2004 was the club's first major trophy in 128 years of existence. Birmingham City beat Arsenal in 2011 and were relegated from the Premier League three months afterwards, a combination no other club has managed. Swansea City won it in 2013 by beating Bradford City, who had reached the final from League Two and had knocked out top-flight opposition on the way.
Set against that, Liverpool won the trophy in four consecutive seasons from 1981 to 1984, and Manchester City did the same from 2018 to 2021. Nottingham Forest won it in 1978 and 1979 and again in 1989 and 1990. The competition rewards a strong squad more often than not. It just does not always.
What the trophy is worth at different sizes of club
The dismissal of the League Cup as a minor honour is almost entirely a top-six position, and it is worth noticing how few clubs that actually covers.
For the great majority of the 92, this is one of two realistic routes to a major trophy and the shorter of them. A Championship club needs to win five or six matches to reach a Wembley final in this competition. That is a smaller ask than a promotion campaign and a much smaller one than an FA Cup run, because the FA Cup's later rounds put you against the same opposition with a full-strength side out. Ask a Middlesbrough supporter who was in Cardiff in 2004 whether the trophy counts.
The counter-case has some force. A competition in which the eventual winner may have beaten three rotated sides on the way is not testing the same thing as a league season, and the two-legged semi-final rather gives the game away: the format exists to make reasonably sure the final has the right clubs in it. Both things are true at once. A trophy that is easier to win is still a trophy, and English football's habit of ranking honours in a strict order is a fairly recent invention anyway.
What has changed is the calendar around it. The competition sits inside a season that now contains more European matches than it did when the trophy was created, and every few years somebody proposes abolishing it or restricting entry. The argument against that is not sentimental. Remove the League Cup and you remove up to eight fixtures a season from clubs that need the gate money, a debut route for young English players, and the only piece of silverware most clubs in the country will ever have a plausible chance of winning.
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