FA Cup Final Day Traditions and Rituals at Wembley

Fifteen minutes or so before kick-off, ninety thousand people at Wembley sing a hymn about dying, and nobody in the ground thinks it odd. It has happened at every FA Cup final since 1927. The words have been sung at enough funerals and enough Remembrance Sunday services in England that most of the crowd manages without the song sheet the Football Association used to hand out at the turnstiles, and the ones who cannot manage hum the tune, which everybody knows anyway.

The final is the last match of the oldest knockout competition in football, and almost everything that happens around it is older than the people watching. Some of it is written down in the FA's competition rules. Most of it is not. It survives because it has always been done, which in English football is the strongest form of rule there is.

• 1872First final
• 1923First final at Wembley
• 1938First televised final
• 107Steps to the Royal Box

Dates from the competition's documented history, not a count from any single season.

Abide With Me, and how a dying vicar's hymn reached a football match

Henry Francis Lyte wrote the words in 1847. He was the curate of Lower Brixham in Devon, he was dying of tuberculosis, and he wrote the verses in the weeks before he left England for the south of France, where he died that November. The tune everyone sings, Eventide, came later, from William Henry Monk in 1861. Neither man had any connection to football and neither could have imagined the use the hymn would be put to.

What put it in front of a football crowd was the First World War and what followed it. By the early 1920s the hymn had become one of the standard pieces of English public mourning, helped by reports that Edith Cavell recited it the night before her execution in 1915. When the FA arranged community singing for the 1927 final — a novelty at the time, conducted from the pitch, with printed sheets distributed to the crowd — Abide With Me was on the programme. Accounts differ on exactly who put it there. The story usually told is that King George V had a fondness for it, which may be true and may be tidying done after the fact.

It stuck. Community singing at Wembley became a fixed part of the build-up, and for two decades after the Second World War it had a conductor of its own: Arthur Caiger, a London headmaster in a white suit, standing on a rostrum in front of the Royal Box with the whole stadium following his arms. That image belongs to the old final as much as the twin towers do.

The hymn has been questioned periodically. It is a funeral piece performed before a sporting event by two sets of supporters who have spent the morning insulting each other, and there have been years when the singing was thin and years when large parts of the ground talked straight through it. Retiring it has been suggested more than once.

It has never gone. The best argument for keeping it is one the FA has never quite made out loud: it is the only moment in the whole afternoon when both ends of the stadium are doing the same thing at the same time, and everyone in the ground can feel the difference when the last line lands.

The anthem, the guest of honour and the line-up on the halfway line

Then the teams come out, side by side, from the same tunnel, into a noise that is genuinely unlike a league crowd because half the stadium has been waiting for this since the third round.

They line up across the halfway line facing the Royal Box and are presented to the guest of honour, who walks the line shaking hands with each player, each substitute and the two managers. The FA sets the running order and the timings, and this is one of the few parts of the day the governing body genuinely controls minute by minute. The presentation is why the players stand in a numbered line rather than milling about, and why the coin toss happens after it rather than before.

King George V attended the 1914 final at Crystal Palace, the first reigning monarch at a final, and royalty has been woven into the occasion ever since. The Royal Box sits at the halfway line at the top of the west stand. Its occupants on final day usually include the President of the FA, senior figures from both clubs, and guests of the Association. Where the presentation is made by a member of the royal family it is normally in the capacity of FA President rather than as a member of the family — a distinction that matters a great deal more to the FA than to anyone in the stands.

The national anthem follows, sung after Abide With Me rather than before it. Then the handshake between the two teams, the mascots leave the pitch, the referee checks the nets, and the entire apparatus of ceremony is cleared away in about ninety seconds.

1. 1Community singingThe stadium works through a short programme of songs led from a pitch-side rostrum.
2. 2Abide With MeThe hymn, sung in full, shortly before the teams come out.
3. 3Teams emergeBoth sides walk out together from the same tunnel and form a line on the halfway line.
4. 4PresentationThe guest of honour walks the line, shaking hands with players, substitutes and managers.
5. 5National anthemSung by the full stadium with the teams still in line.
6. 6Coin tossCaptains and referee at the centre circle, ends and kick-off settled.

The customary order of the pre-match ceremony as run at Wembley; convention rather than a clause in the competition rules.

The referee's final, and the officials nobody photographs

The appointment is published weeks ahead, like a team sheet. Refereeing the final has long been understood inside the English game as the honour at the end of a career rather than another Saturday on the list, and for long stretches of the competition's history a referee who had taken the final did not take it a second time. How strictly that has been applied has varied, and it has been set aside, so it is better described as a strong habit than a rule.

The officials line up on the halfway line with everybody else and are presented to the guest of honour along with the players. Then they vanish from the record of the day almost completely. They collect medals as well — the FA's competition rules set out who is entitled to one, and match officials have been on that list for a very long time — and those are handed over at the same presentation, several rungs below the trophy in the running order.

What has changed most about the referee's afternoon is that it can no longer be handed back. The final used to be replayed when it finished level. Arsenal and Sheffield Wednesday needed a second match in 1993, and that was the last of them; since then extra time and, where it is required, penalties settle the thing on the day. Arsenal and Manchester United went to a shootout in 2005, the first final decided that way, and it rearranged the end of the afternoon entirely. The guest of honour waits. The presentation party stands at the mouth of the tunnel with a trophy nobody can hand over yet, and a stadium built so that the ceremony happens at the west end watches five kicks at the other one.

That is the practical argument for giving the final to a referee who has done a great many big matches rather than to the most decorated one available. A final has more ways of running long than it used to, and the last half hour of one is among the most closely watched football played in England all year.

Cup final suits and the tailoring that comes with them

Nothing in the rules requires a suit. The tradition comes from the era when the final was a formal public engagement first and a football match second, and a club arriving at a royal occasion in tracksuits would have been unthinkable.

So both finalists are measured up weeks in advance. Some clubs use their own tailor, some tie the commission to a sponsor, and the results range from restrained navy to things that get remembered for the wrong reasons. Liverpool's cream suits before the 1996 final against Manchester United are the example everyone reaches for, and they are remembered because Liverpool lost — had Eric Cantona not scored late on, the suits would be a footnote rather than a punchline.

The suits do real work on the day. They are worn for the coach journey, for the walk on the pitch a couple of hours before kick-off when players go out with their families to look at the ground and find their people in the crowd, and for the photographs the club will use for the next twenty years. Then everybody changes. By the time the teams line up for the anthem the tailoring is hanging in a dressing room.

The women's final has picked up the same habit and the same range of results. There is a mild absurdity in a professional squad being fitted for formalwear they will wear for ninety minutes, and clubs know it perfectly well. They do it anyway, because the picture of a team stepping off the coach in matching suits is the picture that ends up framed in the boardroom.

The coach journey down Olympic Way and the send-off before it

The morning belongs to the coach.

Both squads stay at a hotel the night before, usually in or near London whatever part of the country they come from, and both leave under police escort. The approach runs along Olympic Way — Wembley Way to almost everybody — from Wembley Park station down towards the arch, and the last few hundred metres are lined so densely that the coach moves at walking pace. Players film it. They always have, in whatever the equivalent technology of the day happened to be.

Before the London leg there is often a send-off at home. Clubs from outside the capital have a long habit of leaving from their own ground, with several thousand people gathered outside the main stand at seven in the morning to watch a bus pull out of a car park. It is a strange and slightly moving thing to attend. For a town whose club has reached a final for the first time, that send-off is frequently better attended than a league fixture.

The return journey has its own shape. Winners come back to an open-top bus parade through the city or town centre, arranged in advance with the local authority and a route the police have signed off, which means plans exist for both finalists and one set gets shredded on the Saturday evening. Beaten finalists have paraded anyway on occasion. Whether that is dignified or self-flagellating is one of the small permanent arguments of the English game.

If you are making the trip, the practical business of getting to the stadium, where to eat and which station to use is covered in our Wembley Stadium visitor guide, and the broader etiquette of a day out at an English ground sits in the away days guide.

The climb to the Royal Box, then and now

Thirty-nine steps at the old Wembley. One hundred and seven at the new one.

The old climb was the more theatrical of the two because it was so exposed. Players came up through a narrow gap in the crowd, close enough to be grabbed the whole way, which is why so much surviving footage looks like a scrum with a trophy somewhere in the middle of it. The number thirty-nine took on a life of its own, helped along by the coincidence with the novel and the films.

The rebuilt stadium moved the Royal Box higher and took the climb inside the structure, which is how the figure became 107. It is a longer walk and a colder one, up through the stand rather than through the supporters, and the trade-off is that the balcony where the trophy is lifted can be seen from every seat in the ground rather than from about a third of them. The lift is better. The climb is worse. Most players who have done both will say exactly that.

The 107 steps have since become a marketing line for the stadium and a fixture of television commentary, which is what happens to any number repeated often enough. It has the advantage of being correct, which is more than can be said for a good deal of what gets repeated on final day.

At the top there is a short and oddly formal pause. The medals come off a tray held by an official of the Association, the guest of honour hands them over one at a time with a word for each player, and only when the whole squad has been through does the captain get the trophy. Then the lift, always angled towards the winning end, because that is where the photographers have set up and everyone involved knows it.

The cup then has to come back down the same 107 steps, which no camera has ever bothered with, before it reaches the grass and the part of the evening players actually remember afterwards: the lap, the families let out onto the pitch, the kit man wearing somebody else's medal, a child asleep on a shoulder at half past six.

Whether the rebuilt climb is an improvement is still argued at every final. It is safer, and it can be seen from all four sides of the ground. It has none of the contact with the crowd that made the old thirty-nine worth watching, and something was lost when that went, whatever the stewarding gained.

Ribbons on the handles, and the trophy they are tied to

An FA official ties both sets of ribbons to the trophy handles before the match, one in each finalist's colours, so that whatever happens the cup is ready. In the closing minutes, with the result no longer in doubt, the losing club's ribbons are untied and taken away. It is done quietly and off to one side, and it is one of the small cruelties of the occasion that it is usually done while the beaten team is still trying.

The trophy those ribbons go on is not the original. The first cup, the small one Wanderers won in 1872, was stolen from a shop window in Birmingham in 1895 while Aston Villa held it, and was never recovered. Its replacement served until 1910, when it was presented to Lord Kinnaird. The third trophy, made by Fattorini's of Bradford and first won by Bradford City in 1911, is the design everybody pictures, and every cup lifted since has followed that shape. The later versions are replicas of it, made because the earlier one had been handled to the point of fragility.

Medals are dealt with before the trophy. The FA sets the allocation in its competition rules, and that allocation has widened over the decades: for most of the competition's history a medal meant the eleven who started, then substitutes were brought in, and the modern allocation reaches further into the squad and the backroom staff. The first substitute ever used in an FA Cup final was Dennis Clarke, on for West Bromwich Albion against Everton in 1968, which puts a firm date on when the question of who counts as a finalist began to get complicated.

Custody runs for a year. The winners keep the trophy until shortly before the following final, when it goes back to the Association to be cleaned, checked and made ready to have two sets of ribbons tied to it again. In between it does an enormous amount of travelling — civic receptions, junior clubs, hospitals, whatever the sponsors have negotiated — and somebody from the club goes everywhere with it, which is a real job rather than an honorary one. The cup doing that touring is not always the one lifted at Wembley, because replicas exist precisely so that a piece of Victorian silverware is not passed hand to hand round a school hall.

The ribbons themselves have no official standing whatsoever and are treated as though they had a great deal. Clubs keep them. They turn up in boardroom cabinets, in club museums, cut into short lengths and handed to staff who worked the season, framed next to a shirt. For something bought by the yard, they carry an unreasonable share of the day's meaning.

1. 1Ribbons removedThe losing club's ribbons are untied from the handles in the closing minutes.
2. 2Losing side climbsThe beaten finalists go up first and collect runners-up medals in the Royal Box.
3. 3Winners climbThe winning squad follows, medals presented to players, substitutes and staff.
4. 4Captain lastThe captain receives the trophy from the guest of honour on the balcony.
5. 5The liftThe trophy is raised towards the winning end, then carried down for the lap of the pitch.

The customary order at Wembley. The FA's competition rules set the medal allocation; the choreography is convention.

What the beaten finalists do, and why they go first

They go first because the alternative is worse. Sending the losing side up afterwards would mean asking eleven people who have just lost a cup final to stand and wait while the other lot celebrate, a level of ceremonial sadism nobody has ever seriously proposed.

So the beaten finalists climb, take a medal from the guest of honour, get a word and a handshake, and come back down. Some hang the medal round their neck. A great many do not, and there is a persistent minor tradition of a losing player removing his medal before he reaches the bottom of the steps, which television cameras have long since learned to look for.

Then they have to stay. The etiquette, unwritten but firmly enforced by expectation, is that the losing side remains on the pitch for the winners' presentation rather than vanishing down the tunnel. Sides that have not have been criticised for it. Whether the criticism is fair is genuinely arguable — nobody makes a beaten team watch the other lot lift the League Cup at close range — but this is the fixture where the old courtesies are held to hardest.

Beaten finalists do a lap of the pitch to their own supporters afterwards, once the winners' celebrations have moved off. The stand behind that goal is normally still full. More than anything else on the day, that is the thing which tells you what the competition means to the people who follow it.

Cup final television in Britain, from 1938 to the all-day build-up

The BBC televised the 1938 final, Preston North End against Huddersfield Town, decided by a George Mutch penalty in the last minute of extra time. Almost nobody saw it, because almost nobody owned a set. Radio had got there first: the Corporation had been broadcasting live football commentary since early 1927, and the final that year went out on the wireless to a country that had never heard a match described as it happened.

The set that mattered was 1953. Blackpool came from behind to beat Bolton Wanderers, Stan Mortensen scored three and Stanley Matthews got the name of the match, and it reached a British audience which had bought televisions in enormous numbers ahead of the Coronation. That final did more to establish the sport on television in this country than any single fixture before it.

For decades afterwards the FA Cup final held a position no other club match had. Live league football was rare on British television into the 1980s, so the final, the European Cup final and England internationals were close to the whole of it.

Two channels, one match

Both the BBC and ITV covered the final simultaneously. Because they were competing for the same audience with essentially the same pictures, they competed on everything around the pictures instead, and that is where the all-day build-up came from: hours of programming from mid-morning, cameras on both team coaches, players interviewed at home in their front rooms, celebrity supporters, novelty contests between the two squads, and in one long-running strand a full light-entertainment format built around the two clubs.

That world has gone, and its passing is not much mourned by anyone under forty. Live football is everywhere now and the final has to compete with it rather than stand alone in the schedule. What survives is the length of the build-up, still longer than for any other domestic club fixture in England, and the fact that the final remains available free-to-air in Britain, which is not true of every round that precedes it. How the money and the broadcasting fit together in the English game is picked apart in our guide to Premier League TV rights money.

The Oval, Crystal Palace, Wembley, Cardiff, Wembley again

The final has moved more than most people assume.

Period	Venue	Note
1872, 1874–1892	Kennington Oval	A cricket ground, and the competition's first home
1873	Lillie Bridge	A one-off
1893	Fallowfield, Manchester	Badly overcrowded; never used for a final again
1894	Goodison Park	Everton's ground
1895–1914	Crystal Palace	Enormous open banks of spectators
1915	Old Trafford	The wartime final, played largely before servicemen
1920–1922	Stamford Bridge	A stopgap before Wembley opened
1923–2000	Wembley (Empire Stadium)	The twin towers era
2001–2006	Millennium Stadium, Cardiff	While Wembley was rebuilt
2007 onwards	Wembley Stadium	The rebuilt ground under the arch

The first final, in 1872, was played at a cricket ground in south London between Wanderers and Royal Engineers in front of a crowd small enough to count by hand. Twenty years later the competition had outgrown everything it tried. Fallowfield in 1893 was so badly overcrowded that spectators spilled onto the playing surface, and Manchester never got another final. Crystal Palace, with its vast grass banks, then held it for two decades until the war stopped play.

Wembley — the Empire Stadium, built for the British Empire Exhibition and finished in a little over three hundred days — opened with the 1923 final and immediately produced the most famous crowd-control failure in English football. Far more people got in than the ground could hold, they covered the pitch completely, and it was cleared largely by mounted police, among them PC George Scorey on a grey horse called Billie who looked white on the newsreel and gave the match its name. Bolton beat West Ham 2–0 once the thing finally started.

The years in Cardiff between 2001 and 2006, while Wembley was demolished and rebuilt, are the only extended period in a century when the final was not played in England. The Millennium Stadium did the job well, and a generation of supporters has real affection for those finals, partly because Cardiff is a better city to spend a day in than the Wembley end of Brent. Drawn finals, before penalties settled them, went elsewhere again — Chelsea and Leeds United needed Old Trafford in 1970 to finish their argument.

Songs, flags and the visual grammar of the day

Rosettes and wooden rattles for most of the twentieth century. Then scarves, then flags, then the half-and-half scarf, sold outside every final and worn by almost nobody who has followed their club all season.

Each club brings its own anthem, and the final is the one occasion when those songs are performed to a national audience instead of to the away end at Turf Moor in November. You'll Never Walk Alone, I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles with its bubble machine, Blue Moon, Glad All Over. These are not neutral pieces of music to the people singing them, and part of what makes the final's atmosphere distinctive is two entirely separate musical traditions occupying one stadium.

Then there is the cup final single, a genuinely English piece of cultural history which ran from the late 1960s to the early 1990s and produced records that were, without exception, terrible and beloved. Tottenham's Ossie's Dream in 1981, recorded with Chas & Dave. Liverpool's Anfield Rap in 1988. Manchester United's Glory Glory in 1983. Squads went into studios, sang badly, mimed on television and charted. The practice faded roughly when players started earning enough that a novelty single stopped being worth an afternoon of anyone's time.

Choreographed displays in the stands are newer and largely borrowed from the continent — card mosaics, giant surfer flags, banners run by supporters' groups. What can be brought into the ground is governed by the stadium regulations, so the larger displays are agreed with the club and the stadium months ahead. What has not changed is the colour: two ends of a stadium in two solid blocks of it, which is why the aerial shot before kick-off ends up on the front of every newspaper in the country the following morning.

How the day works when your club has never been there

Everything above assumes an institutional memory. At a first final there is none, and the difference shows from the moment tickets go on sale.

Allocation is the first problem. Both finalists receive a large block of tickets, but demand at a first final runs far past it, and clubs distribute by loyalty scheme — season-ticket holders first, then accumulated away points, then a ballot, with the criteria published in advance so the inevitable complaints can be answered with a rule rather than an opinion. A club with twenty thousand season-ticket holders and a smaller allocation has to disappoint people who have been going for thirty years. There is no version of that process which does not end in a phone-in.

The second difference is that a first-time finalist invents its rituals on the spot, and half of them stick. Where the coach leaves from. Which pub the supporters' club takes over. What the flag says. The town does things it has never done: shop windows painted, a civic reception planned for a result nobody can predict, schools letting out early. Wigan Athletic beating Manchester City in 2013 is the sharpest recent illustration of what that looks like when it comes off, and Portsmouth in 2008 of what a first final in generations does to a city.

There is one more thing, and clubs that have been before will warn you about it. The day goes faster than anyone expects. Players who have lost finals talk about not remembering the walk out at all, and supporters describe the same blur. Whatever else the rituals are for — and a fair amount of the ceremony exists to be televised — they also slow the afternoon down and give people something to hold onto. That is why they have survived so long, and why the FA has been so reluctant to cut any of them.

For how the two finalists got there in the first place, start with our guide to how the FA Cup draws are made and the history of the FA Cup. What a run to Wembley is worth in cash is broken down separately in FA Cup prize money explained, and the rest of the English game starts from the England hub and the football section.