FA Trophy and FA Vase Explained for Non League Fans

Two hundred and something supporters in a covered terrace at a Step 5 ground on a Saturday in November, and the club secretary — who also runs the raffle and drives the minibus — is working out whether the gate will cover the match officials and the pies. That club is in a national competition with a Wembley final at the end of it. So is the full-time club two divisions above with a four-thousand crowd and a training ground. They are not in the same one, and the line between them is the thing this page is about.

The FA Challenge Trophy and the FA Challenge Vase are The Football Association's two national knockout competitions for clubs below the Football League. They are administered from Wembley under FA competition rules, they are open to clubs in FA-sanctioned leagues across England, and between them they cover the whole of the non-League game from the National League down to the parks-adjacent end of the pyramid. Neither is a consolation prize for missing out on the FA Cup. Non-League clubs enter that too, and the good ones enter all three.

Where the two competitions came from, and what they replaced

The Trophy came first, in 1969-70, and it was created to solve a problem the FA had made for itself.

The FA Amateur Cup, founded in 1893, had been the non-League game's national competition for three-quarters of a century. Its entry condition was that a club's players were unpaid. By the 1960s that condition had become a fiction maintained by nobody in particular. Clubs made payments described as expenses, boot money, or employment at a sponsor's factory, and everybody in the game knew it, and the FA's amateur status rules were being enforced selectively at best. Meanwhile the clubs that were straightforwardly semi-professional — the strongest sides in the Southern League and the Northern Premier League — had no national competition of their own at all beyond the FA Cup, where they were knocked out by League clubs in January.

So the FA created the Challenge Trophy for them. Macclesfield Town won the first final at Wembley in 1970, beating Telford United, and the competition immediately did what it was built to do: it gave the top tier of non-League football a national knockout with a Wembley day at the end of it.

Four years later the FA went further and abolished the amateur-professional distinction entirely, ending a classification that had been part of English football since the 1880s. The Amateur Cup died with it, having been played for the last time in 1974. The Vase arrived the following season as its replacement, with Hoddesdon Town winning the first final at Wembley, and the sorting principle changed from status to level. That change is the single most important thing to understand about these two competitions, and it is why the question "is my club good enough for the Trophy" has a precise answer and the question "is my club professional" has no bearing on anything.

• 1893FA Amateur Cup founded
• 1970FA Trophy first played
• 1974FA Amateur Cup abolished
• 1975FA Vase first played

Fixed historical dates for the two competitions and the FA Amateur Cup they succeeded. Not a count of entrants or clubs.

Which competition a club enters, and why it is decided by step

Eligibility is set by position in the National League System, the FA-administered structure that runs from the National League at Step 1 downwards through Steps 2, 3, 4, 5 and below. The Trophy takes clubs from the upper part of that system, broadly Steps 1 to 4. The Vase takes clubs from Step 5 and below.

That is a structural division, not a moral one, and the distinction matters because the competitions it replaced were divided on entirely different grounds. Before 1974 English football sorted its non-League cups by status: the FA Amateur Cup for clubs whose players were not paid, the FA Trophy for those whose players were. When the FA abolished the formal distinction between amateur and professional in 1974, the Amateur Cup had no basis to exist and was wound up. The Vase replaced it, and the replacement was drawn on level rather than on payment. A Step 6 club with a modest playing budget enters the Vase. A Step 4 club with a similar budget enters the Trophy. What decides it is the division, and only the division.

The practical consequence for supporters is that a club's cup competition can change without the club doing anything differently. Win promotion from Step 5 to Step 4 and next season's Vase run becomes a Trophy run, against opposition with full-time players in it. Go down and the reverse happens. Non-League steps explained sets out the whole ladder, and the English football pyramid covers how it connects to the EFL above.

57%43%

• FA Trophy, Steps 1 to 44
• FA Vase, Step 5 and below3

The structural division set by FA competition rules. The exact placement of the boundary has been adjusted as the pyramid has been restructured, so it is the principle rather than a fixed permanent line.

Show the numbers

How the National League System divides between the two competitions

Item	Value
FA Trophy, Steps 1 to 4	4
FA Vase, Step 5 and below	3

Where the boundary has moved

The dividing line has not been fixed for the whole life of the two competitions. The FA has restructured the National League System more than once, adding divisions at Step 4, reorganising the regional feeder leagues, and changing which leagues sit at which step. Each restructure moved some clubs across the Trophy-Vase boundary without those clubs being promoted or relegated. The Vase's lower limit has also been adjusted, with entry at the lowest steps opened and narrowed at different times.

Anyone writing about this in absolute terms is going to be wrong within a few seasons. The principle holds: Trophy above, Vase below, boundary set by the FA and reviewed periodically.

How the two competitions sit alongside the FA Cup

A non-League club's season contains three national knockout competitions and there is no exclusivity between them. A Step 4 club can be in the FA Cup qualifying rounds in September, the FA Trophy in October and its own county cup in November, all while playing a league programme of forty-plus matches with a squad of eighteen and no full-time medical staff.

The FA Cup is the senior competition and the one that pays best. It starts with an extra preliminary round in high summer and takes hundreds of clubs from Step 6 upwards through six qualifying rounds before the first round proper, and the qualifying prize money at each stage is the reason a small club's finance director watches the draw carefully. FA Cup qualifying rounds explained covers that ladder in detail.

The Trophy and the Vase start later, usually once the FA Cup qualifying rounds have thinned the field, and they run through the winter. The scheduling is deliberate: a club knocked out of the FA Cup in September has something else national to play for, and a club still in both is playing a fixture pile-up that at this level is genuinely damaging. Managers at Step 3 and Step 4 talk openly about which competition they are prioritising, and the honest ones say the FA Cup, because of the money.

	FA Cup	FA Trophy	FA Vase
Entry level	Step 6 upwards, plus EFL and Premier League clubs	Steps 1 to 4	Step 5 and below
Starts	High summer, extra preliminary round	Early autumn	Early autumn
Draw	Regionalised in qualifying, open from the first round proper	Regionalised early, open later	Regionalised early, open later
Final	Wembley	Wembley	Wembley
Highest earner for a small club	Reaching the first round proper and beyond	The later rounds and the final	The final

The round structure, and where each club comes in

Both competitions use the same basic shape as the FA Cup: qualifying rounds to reduce the entry, then numbered rounds proper, then the quarter-finals, semi-finals and final. Both stagger the entry so that clubs from higher steps come in later than clubs from lower ones, which is the standard method of protecting a competition from being decided by the fixture pile-up in its opening weeks.

In the Trophy, the Step 3 and Step 4 clubs enter at the qualifying stage and the Step 1 and Step 2 clubs come in around the first round proper. In the Vase the same logic applies with Step 6 clubs and below entering earliest. Ties are single matches with replays used more extensively than the FA Cup now allows, for the reason given above: at this level a replay is a second gate and clubs want it.

The semi-finals have historically been played over two legs in both competitions — a piece of design that says a great deal about the FA's priorities for them. A one-off semi-final on a neutral ground gives you a better spectacle. Two legs give a small club two home crowds, two bar takes and two programme runs, and for a club whose annual turnover is smaller than a Premier League player's weekly wage that is the difference between a good season and a transformative one. The FA has adjusted the format over the years and the two-legged semi-final has not been permanent in either competition, but the reasoning behind it is the clearest single illustration of what these competitions are for.

1. 1Entry acceptedThe club is affiliated to its County FA, playing in an FA-sanctioned league at an eligible step, and its ground meets the grading standard.
2. 2Qualifying roundsRegionalised ties against nearby clubs, keeping travel costs down while the entry is at its largest.
3. 3Rounds properThe field narrows and the draw begins to send clubs further afield, with midweek replays where ties finish level.
4. 4Quarter-finalA crowd two or three times the league average, temporary stand hire, and stewarding costs the club has never budgeted for.
5. 5Semi-finalHistorically two legs, giving the club a home tie and a share of an away gate, and a week between them that nobody at the club sleeps through.
6. 6FinalWembley, with a coach fleet, a ticket allocation the club has to shift itself, and a walk up the steps that the volunteers remember longer than the players do.

The shape of an FA Vase run under FA competition rules. Round names and the number of qualifying rounds are set each season by the FA and vary with the size of the entry.

Draws in both competitions are regionalised in the early rounds and opened up later. That is a cost control rather than a competitive device: a Step 6 club in Cornwall drawn against a Step 6 club in Northumberland in October would face a coach hire that exceeds the round's prize money several times over. The FA splits the draw north and south until the field is small enough that the travel is worth it.

Wembley, and what the day actually means to a small club

The FA has staged both finals at Wembley since their early years. Both moved out during the period when the old stadium was demolished and the new one built, and were played at club grounds — Villa Park among the venues used — before returning when the new stadium opened. The FA now pairs them, staging the Trophy and Vase finals across a single weekend billed as non-League finals day, which puts the two competitions in front of one another's supporters and gives the FA one operation to run rather than two.

For a Step 5 club, a Wembley final is not a football match with a bigger crowd. It is an administrative event on a scale nobody at the club has handled.

The club receives a ticket allocation and has to sell it, which means a ticket office where there has never been one, a printing job, a system for handling money from people who have never bought a ticket for anything at that ground. It has to arrange transport for a support that is used to walking to the ground. It needs kit, a matchday programme contribution, a suit for the chairman, insurance, and somebody to answer a phone that will not stop ringing from the moment the semi-final finishes. All of this is done by people with day jobs.

The crowds these finals draw are substantial by non-League standards and modest by Wembley's, which produces the odd spectacle of thirty or forty thousand people in a stadium built for ninety, with the two ends full and the sides empty. Nobody in either end minds. The FA Amateur Cup finals of the early 1950s regularly filled the old Wembley — Pegasus and Bishop Auckland drew a crowd reported at a hundred thousand in 1951 — which is a reminder that the non-League game once had a national audience that television and the growth of the League together took away from it.

Crowds at non-League finals, then and now

There is a persistent belief among older supporters that the non-League game has lost its audience, and on the evidence of the finals that belief is roughly correct, though the reason is not the one usually given.

The Amateur Cup finals of the immediate post-war decade were among the best-attended football matches in the country. Pegasus, a side made up of Oxford and Cambridge students, played Bishop Auckland at Wembley in 1951 in front of a crowd reported at a hundred thousand, and finals of that era regularly drew six figures. That was not because the football was better than it is now. It was because there was very little else to watch, no live television, a much larger participation base in works and church football, and a genuine national interest in the amateur game as a category.

Everything on that list changed. Live football arrived on television in quantity. The Football League expanded its reach through broadcasting. The category of "amateur football" as something the general public followed simply stopped existing after 1974, along with the competition that expressed it.

Modern Trophy and Vase finals draw crowds that are large by the standards of the clubs involved and small by the standards of the stadium — the two ends filled, the sides largely empty, an atmosphere that carries because it is concentrated rather than because it is loud. Pairing the two finals on one weekend has helped, since a supporter travelling for one will often stay for the other. The FA publishes attendance figures for both, and they have trended upwards over the period since the finals returned to the rebuilt Wembley, which is more than can be said for most attendance series in English football outside the top two divisions.

What has held up better is the crowd at the earlier rounds. A quarter-final at a Step 5 ground will draw several times the club's league average, because the local interest in a small club doing something unusual is real and has never gone away. That is where the competitions live.

The money, and what it actually funds

The FA publishes a prize fund for each competition, paid at every round from the qualifying stages upward. The payments start small and rise steeply, with the great majority of the fund concentrated in the last three or four rounds and the largest single payment going to the winners. Losing finalists are paid too, at a meaningful level.

Quoting a figure here would be a disservice, because the FA sets the fund each season and it has been revised upwards several times. What is worth understanding is the shape. A club knocked out in the second qualifying round of the Vase receives an amount that covers the officials and the coach. A club that reaches the quarter-finals receives something that changes a budget line. A club that reaches Wembley receives something that changes the club.

Gate receipts matter at least as much and are handled differently. Under the competition rules a share of the gate from earlier rounds is pooled or divided rather than kept entirely by the home club, which spreads the benefit of a good draw and protects a club that has drawn away every round. In the later stages the home club keeps a larger share.

What the money funds is nearly always infrastructure rather than players. Floodlights that meet the grading standard for the step above. A stand with the seat count the FA requires. A covered terrace, a new pitch, a clubhouse roof that has been leaking for four years. Ground grading is the constraint that governs a non-League club's ambitions more tightly than its playing budget does, because a club can win its division and be refused promotion if the ground does not meet the standard for the step above, and the standards get expensive quickly. A Vase run that pays for a stand is a Vase run that makes promotion legally possible.

Some clubs do spend it on the squad, and a few have been badly damaged by doing so. The pattern — a cup run, a raised playing budget, a subsequent season without a cup run, an insolvency — is well enough documented in the non-League game that supporters recognise it when it starts.

Travel, away support and the culture around these competitions

The away support at a Vase tie in December is a specific English phenomenon and worth describing accurately, because it is nothing like an away day in the Football League.

It is small, often between twenty and a hundred, and it is self-organised. There is no away end and frequently no segregation, so both sets of supporters stand on the same terrace and swap ends at half-time along with the players. Admission is paid at a turnstile in cash to a volunteer. The tea bar is run by somebody's mother. The programme is stapled. If the tie goes to a replay, a group of supporters will drive two hundred miles on a Tuesday night for it, on their own money, having taken a half-day.

The regionalised draw means the early rounds are local, and a Vase run therefore starts as a sequence of derbies against clubs a supporter has watched forty times. It is the later rounds, when the draw opens, that produce the journey to a part of England the club has never played in. Those are the ties supporters talk about a decade later, and they are also the ones that cost a club money if the gate at the other end is poor.

There is very little television. A handful of ties get streamed, the finals are covered, and the rest exists in club social media, local newspapers and the memories of the people who were there. Whether that is a loss or the whole point depends on who you ask, and both answers have something to them.

The Vase-to-Trophy double, and why almost nobody manages it

Winning both competitions requires a club to do two things that pull against each other in time.

First, win the Vase, which means being one of the strongest clubs at Step 5 or below. Then climb — at least one step and usually two — into the Trophy's territory. Then win the Trophy, against opposition that at Step 1 and Step 2 includes full-time professional clubs with parachute money from a recent relegation out of the EFL and squads assembled on budgets an order of magnitude larger. The climb takes years and requires the ground grading, the finance and the committee stability to survive it. Most clubs that win a Vase do not go up two steps. Most clubs at Step 1 have never been at Step 6.

The reverse route is no easier and rather sadder: a club wins the Trophy, then declines through the pyramid until it is eligible for the Vase, and by the time it is there it is a different club with different people in it.

What is common is dominance within one competition. Whitley Bay won the Vase four times, including three consecutive finals between 2009 and 2011, which is the sort of run that a Step 5 club is occasionally able to put together when a good squad stays together for three seasons. In the Trophy, Macclesfield Town won the first final in 1970 and returned to win it again decades later. Woking took it three times in the 1990s. Telford United had a similar spell in the 1980s. Wycombe Wanderers won it in 1991 and 1993 and then went into the Football League, which is the sequence every ambitious Trophy club has in mind.

That last route — Trophy success as a staging post to the EFL — is covered from the other direction in non-League clubs that reached the Football League and in National League promotion to the EFL.

The volunteer effort behind a cup run

A Step 5 club has no full-time employees. The secretary, who is the person the FA's competition department actually deals with, is a volunteer with a job. So is the treasurer, the groundsman, the person who does the programme, the two who run the bar and the four who steward the gate.

A cup run multiplies every one of those roles at once. The secretary handles the FA's entry and eligibility paperwork, player registrations, the correspondence over the tie, and the arrangements with the opposing club. The groundsman, who normally has to get a pitch through a wet winter with a fork and a roller, now has to get it through a wet winter with three extra matches on it and a television camera crew wanting vehicle access. Somebody has to write a risk assessment for a crowd four times the usual size. Somebody has to find another five stewards, and stewards at that level are volunteers who then cannot watch the match.

It is worth stating plainly what happens if any of it is missed. Fail to register a player correctly and the club is removed from the competition. Fail to meet the ground grading criteria at the required date and the club may be barred from promotion. The FA's rules are not applied more gently because a club is small, and expulsions for administrative failure happen every season across the National League System. The County FA is the club's first point of contact for most of it, and what a County FA does explains that relationship.

The people who do this work are the reason both competitions exist in the form they do. The FA runs them; the clubs are run by about fifteen people each.

Following the competitions through a season

There is no single broadcaster and no single place where all of it is gathered, which is the main practical obstacle for a supporter who wants to follow the Trophy or the Vase beyond their own club.

The FA publishes the draws, the round dates and the competition rules, and the draws are the fixed points in the calendar worth diarising. Beyond that it is club websites, local radio, the non-League press and a network of independent sites and social accounts that between them cover the pyramid better than any national outlet does. Attendance figures, results and progress through the rounds are compiled by enthusiasts to a standard the professional game would struggle to match.

The most useful advice for anyone starting is unglamorous. Pick a step, pick a region, and follow the draw from the qualifying rounds rather than joining at the quarter-finals, because the interest in these competitions is cumulative — the value of a club reaching a semi-final is in knowing what it took to get there. Ground hopping in England is the natural companion to that, and a Vase Saturday is the cheapest good football day out in the country.

Both finals are at Wembley and both are worth the trip, whoever is in them. If you have only ever been to the stadium for an England match or a play-off final, the difference is instructive: the same walk up Wembley Way, the same tunnel, and a set of supporters for whom the whole thing is happening for the first and quite possibly the only time. The rest of the domestic knockout picture, from the FA Cup down, and what happens when one of these ties finishes level under extra time and penalties rules, sits across the England guides and the football section.