History of the FA Cup, the Oldest Knockout in Football
The history of the FA Cup from the 1871 committee room to Wembley, taking in the stolen trophy, the White Horse Final and English football's shifting power.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Domestic Cups20 min read
- Competition proposed
- 1871
- First final
- 16 March 1872
- Clubs in the first competition
- 15
- Trophies used
- Five designs
On 20 July 1871, in the offices of a sporting newspaper off Fleet Street, the secretary of The Football Association put a proposal to his committee: that a cup should be provided for which all clubs belonging to the Association should be invited to compete. Charles Alcock had seen the knockout house competitions at Harrow, where a set of teams were reduced to one by elimination, and he thought the same shape would work for a national association with a scattering of members and no fixture list to speak of.
Fifteen clubs entered. The Football Association Challenge Cup has been played every season since, apart from the two world wars, which makes it the oldest football competition in the world by a comfortable margin — older than the Scottish Cup, older than the Football League by seventeen years, older than any national championship anywhere. The trophy handed over at Wembley is the fifth of its line, and the story of why there have been five is one of the better stories in English sport.
The founding, the first entrants and a goal scored under a pseudonym
The rules Alcock drafted were short. Ties would be drawn without seeding, the winners of each round would go into the next, and clubs would pay a guinea to enter. Fifteen accepted: a mixture of public school old boys' sides, London clubs and one from Scotland, Queen's Park of Glasgow, who reached the semi-final without playing a match because their opponents scratched or the tie was drawn and they could not afford to travel back down for a replay.
Wanderers, Alcock's own club, won the first final on 16 March 1872 at Kennington Oval. Royal Engineers were favourites and lost 1-0. The goal was scored by Morton Betts, who played under the name "A.H. Chequer" — a joke, standing for "a Harrow Chequer", the club he had also turned out for that season and which he was technically ineligible to represent. Registration rules were not what they became.
Alcock captained the winning side and had drafted the competition. He would later organise the first football international and the first Test match in England, which makes him a candidate for the most consequential administrator British sport has produced, and a name most English supporters have never heard.
The final itself was played under conditions that would now be classed as a training exercise. There were no crossbars in the modern sense at every ground, no penalty kick, no goal nets, no numbered players, and the goalkeeper had no defined privileges beyond a general understanding that handling near his own line was tolerated. Teams changed ends after every goal. Two umpires stood on the field, one appointed by each club, and disputes went to a referee stationed off the pitch who intervened only when the umpires could not agree. The referee did not come onto the field of play as the sole arbiter until the 1890s, by which time the competition was two decades old.
Entry conditions were loose in a way that would be unthinkable now. A club needed only to be a member of the Association. There was no ground grading, no minimum standard of facility, no requirement to have completed a season in a sanctioned league, and no financial vetting of any kind. Every one of those requirements arrived later, and each arrived because something went wrong.
- 1871Year proposed
- 15Clubs in the first competition
- 1872Year of the first final
- 5Trophy designs used
Fixed historical facts about the competition's first season and the number of trophy designs used since. Not a count of anything current.
The early rounds were played to a formula that would be unrecognisable now. Ties were often decided by which club could afford the railway fare, byes were handed out to make the numbers work, and a drawn tie could produce a replay, a second replay and occasionally a decision by the committee. There was no fixed round of thirty-two or sixty-four; the number of entrants determined the shape and the shape changed every year. Modern supporters used to the tidy ladder set out in FA Cup rounds explained would find the first decade chaotic.
Amateur clubs and the southern years
For the first eleven seasons the cup did not leave the south of England, and it barely left a narrow social band within it. Wanderers won five of the first seven. Old Etonians reached six finals. Oxford University, Royal Engineers, Old Carthusians and Clapham Rovers made up most of the rest. These were amateur sides drawn from the public schools and the universities, playing a game they had codified themselves, in a competition run by a body largely composed of the same men.
The football was recognisably the ancestor of the modern game and recognisably different from it. Dribbling was the dominant style in the south, with the ball carried forward by an individual and the rest of the side backing up behind him, and passing regarded in some quarters as slightly unsporting. Royal Engineers are usually credited with the first systematic use of the combination game — moving the ball between players by design rather than as a last resort — which they brought from military drill and which the northern professional clubs would later perfect.
The competition's amateur character was not incidental. It was the point. The FA's founders believed sport should be played by men who did not need paying for it, and the cup was a showcase for that belief.
It lasted eleven years.
Blackburn, professionalism and the shift north
In 1883 Blackburn Olympic beat Old Etonians 2-1 at the Oval, and the balance of English football moved a hundred and eighty miles up the country and never moved back. The Olympic side was made up of working men — weavers, a plumber, a spinner — who had been taken to Blackpool for a week of special training before the final, a piece of preparation that struck the amateur establishment as very close to cheating.
The following season Blackburn Rovers won it, and the season after that, and the season after that. Three in a row. The FA legalised professionalism in 1885, having spent two years trying to stop it and having realised that the northern clubs would simply leave and form their own association if it did not. From that point the cup was a competition between professional clubs with an amateur tail, and the Football League, founded in 1888 by twelve clubs from the Midlands and the north, formalised what the cup had already demonstrated. The history of the Football League picks that thread up.
Preston North End's 1889 side won the league without losing a match and the cup without conceding a goal, which remains the only Double achieved in that manner. Two years earlier the same club had beaten Hyde 26-0 in a first-round tie, a scoreline that has never been approached in the competition and probably never will be, since the qualifying structure now makes a mismatch of that scale impossible.
The southern amateur clubs did not disappear so much as withdraw. Several stopped entering. The FA created the Amateur Cup in 1893 to give them a competition of their own, an act of separation whose consequences ran right through to the creation of the modern non-League cups described in the FA Trophy and FA Vase explained.
Five trophies, one theft and a confession sixty-three years late
The first trophy was small, silver and known as the little tin idol. It stood barely eighteen inches high and cost the Association twenty pounds.
In September 1895 it was on display in the window of William Shillcock's football goods shop on Newtown Row in Birmingham, where Aston Villa had lent it after winning the final. Somebody broke in overnight and took it. It was never recovered. The FA fined Villa twenty-five pounds — the replacement cost — and had a second cup made to the same design.
That second trophy lasted until 1910, when the FA discovered that a Manchester firm had been producing copies of it for other competitions, and that the design was therefore not protected. Rather than fight it, the Association retired the trophy, presented it to Lord Kinnaird for his long service, and commissioned a new one from Fattorini and Sons of Bradford. In one of the more satisfying coincidences in English football, the first club to win the new trophy was Bradford City.
The Fattorini cup lasted eighty years, through two wars and eleven decades of English social change, before it was retired in 1991 on grounds of sheer fragility and replaced by an exact replica. That replica served for around two decades before it too was replaced in the same way.
There is a detail in the 1910 retirement that says something about how English football was run. The FA did not lose a court case over the copied design; it discovered that it had never protected the design in the first place, and that a rival manufacturer was entitled to reproduce it. The Association's response — retire the trophy, give it to a former president as a testimonial gift, order a new one — was a characteristically Edwardian solution to an administrative failure. Lord Kinnaird had played in nine finals and won five, a record for appearances that has never been beaten, and by then had been president of the FA for over twenty years.
In 1958 a Birmingham man named Harry Burge confessed to a Sunday newspaper that he had taken the original cup and that it had been melted down to produce counterfeit half-crowns. He was in his eighties and the details he gave did not entirely fit the known facts of the burglary. It is the only confession there has ever been, it may well be true, and there is no way now to establish it. Which is a more honest ending than the tidy one usually told.
Finals at the Oval, at Crystal Palace and at grounds that are now car parks
The final moved around for its first fifty years, and following it is a decent way of tracking where the population and the money were.
| Period | Venue |
|---|---|
| 1872-1892 | Kennington Oval, apart from 1873 at Lillie Bridge |
| 1893 | Fallowfield, Manchester |
| 1894 | Goodison Park, Liverpool |
| 1895-1914 | Crystal Palace, south London |
| 1915 | Old Trafford, Manchester |
| 1920-1922 | Stamford Bridge, London |
| 1923-2000 | Empire Stadium, Wembley |
| 2001-2006 | Millennium Stadium, Cardiff |
| 2007 onwards | Wembley Stadium |
The Oval was a cricket ground and Surrey eventually tired of a football crowd on the outfield in March. Fallowfield in 1893 was a disaster — the crowd broke onto the pitch and the match was played out with spectators pressed to the touchline — and the FA did not go back. Crystal Palace, by contrast, worked. The natural amphitheatre in the park held enormous crowds on a grass bank, and finals there routinely drew numbers that no purpose-built ground of the period could have accommodated.
The 1915 final at Old Trafford is remembered as the Khaki Cup Final, played in front of a crowd thick with servicemen while the country was at war, after which the competition was suspended until 1920.
- Kennington OvalA cricket ground in south London stages most finals until 1892, with the FA's own secretary also serving as Surrey's.
- Fallowfield and GoodisonTwo experiments in the north. Fallowfield in 1893 is overwhelmed by the crowd and never used again.
- Crystal PalaceA natural amphitheatre in a public park holds the largest pre-war crowds in English football from 1895 to 1914.
- Old Trafford and Stamford BridgeWartime and immediate post-war finals, with Chelsea's ground filling in while a permanent home is sought.
- Empire Stadium, WembleyFrom 1923, the fixed home of the final for seventy-seven years, and the first ground built for the purpose.
- Millennium Stadium, CardiffSix finals in Wales while the old Wembley is demolished and rebuilt.
- Wembley StadiumThe rebuilt ground takes the final back from 2007, and takes the semi-finals with it.
The sequence of principal venues for the FA Cup final. Individual replays have sometimes been staged elsewhere, most notably at Old Trafford in 1970.
The White Horse Final and the crowds nobody counted
The Empire Stadium at Wembley opened in 1923 and the FA moved the final there immediately. It had capacity for a very large crowd and no ticketing arrangement to match, and the first final held in it — Bolton Wanderers against West Ham United — remains the most photographed event in English football before television.
The official attendance was recorded as 126,047. Nobody in the ground believed it. The gates were shut and then forced, people came over the walls, and estimates of the real number have ranged from a hundred and fifty thousand to well over two hundred thousand, none of them verifiable. The crowd covered the pitch entirely. What cleared it, over the best part of an hour, was a small number of mounted police, one of whom — PC George Scorey on a grey horse called Billy that photographed as white — became the symbol of the whole afternoon. Bolton won 2-0. West Ham's players said afterwards that the pitch had been churned into something unplayable before a ball was kicked.
The consequence was ticketing. Every final from that point was all-ticket, and the FA's allocation system — the split between the two competing clubs, the county associations, the League clubs and the FA's own affiliates — became one of the enduring grievances of English supporter culture, and remains one now. A supporter who has followed a club through six rounds and cannot get a ticket for the seventh has been complaining about the same thing for a hundred years.
Radio, television and the making of a national day
In 1927 the BBC broadcast the final live on radio, one of the first sporting events in Britain to be covered that way, and the listener was helped by a numbered grid of the pitch printed in the Radio Times so that the commentator could call out squares. Cardiff City beat Arsenal 1-0, which makes them the only club from outside England to have won the competition. The BBC televised a final for the first time in 1938.
What happened after the war was more significant than either. The final became, for roughly four decades, the only complete domestic match shown live on British television in a normal season. Everything else was highlights. That single fact explains the hold the FA Cup had on English culture between the 1950s and the 1980s in a way that nothing about the football itself does. Cup Final day started in the morning, ran through hours of build-up on two channels, and was watched by people with no interest in either club and no interest in football the rest of the year.
The matches that filled it are the ones that became folklore. Blackpool coming from 3-1 down against Bolton in 1953 in what everybody called the Matthews Final, though Stan Mortensen scored the hat-trick. Bert Trautmann finishing the 1956 final for Manchester City with a broken neck, unaware of it. The 1970 final between Chelsea and Leeds, a match of such physical violence that a modern referee would have finished it with eight men a side, replayed at Old Trafford because Wembley's pitch had been ruined by the Horse of the Year Show.
Then the schedule fragmented. Live league football arrived in quantity, the final lost its uniqueness, and its kick-off time — for decades an immovable three o'clock on a Saturday — began to move for broadcast reasons. FA Cup final day traditions covers what survived that and what did not.
The clubs that have won it, and the clubs that have waited
Arsenal have won the FA Cup more often than anyone else, Manchester United sit next, and behind them a group including Chelsea, Liverpool, Tottenham Hotspur, Manchester City and Aston Villa are close enough together that the order changes. Any figure quoted for a club's total needs a date attached, which is why this page gives none.
The distributions underneath that are more interesting than the top of the table. A substantial number of clubs have won it exactly once, and for several of them it is the only major honour in their history — a single afternoon that defines a club's entire record. Wanderers, five-time winners and the most successful club of the competition's first decade, no longer exist in their original form. Royal Engineers still play, in the Army game, having reached four finals and won one.
Tottenham Hotspur won the cup in 1901 as a Southern League club, which is to say as a non-League club, and no club outside the Football League has done it since. That is the single most quoted fact in FA Cup history and it is worth stating precisely: Tottenham were not a small club, they were a substantial professional operation playing outside a league structure that had not yet expanded to include them.
Portsmouth held the trophy from 1939 to 1946, seven years, because the war suspended the competition immediately after they won it. It sat out the conflict in a variety of places, including, by one account, a coal cellar.
Individual records within the competition tend to be more stable than club ones, because they are set by careers rather than by spending. Ashley Cole finished with seven winners' medals, more than any other player. Kinnaird's nine final appearances stand from the amateur era and will not be touched, since no modern player will reach nine finals in a competition that a leading club now enters in January. The record winning margin in a final is Bury's six-goal victory over Derby County in 1903, a scoreline that has survived more than a century of tighter, better-organised football and shows no sign of being challenged.
The last club from outside the top division to win it was West Ham United in 1980, from the Second Division. Sunderland had done it in 1973 and Southampton in 1976, both from the second tier. Nothing in the rules prevents it happening again; the money in the top division simply makes it less likely, in the way that surviving a first season in the Premier League is harder than it was.
Giant-killing, and what it actually means
The word entered English football through this competition and it has a specific meaning: a club from a materially lower level of the pyramid knocking out one from a materially higher one, in a single match, at the smaller club's ground more often than not.
Hereford United beating Newcastle United in 1972, on a mud heap at Edgar Street with a goal from thirty-five yards, is the version everybody has seen, largely because the BBC had sent a young reporter and the film survived. Walsall beating Arsenal in 1933 is the version an older generation would name. There have been dozens, and the structure of the competition guarantees more, because the draw is unseeded from the third round and a Premier League club can be sent to a non-League ground with a capacity of four thousand and a pitch that has taken a winter's punishment.
The economics of it are worth understanding. A non-League club drawn at home to a top-division side faces a decision: play the tie at its own ground, where it might win, or switch it to the bigger club's stadium for a share of a far larger gate. Clubs have gone both ways, and the ones that stay at home are frequently doing so at real financial cost. FA Cup giant killings goes through the matches themselves, and FA Cup prize money sets out what a run is actually worth at each stage.
What makes the giant-killing possible is structural rather than romantic, and it is worth being precise about the mechanism. A knockout tie over ninety minutes is a small sample. Football is a low-scoring game in which the better side wins a single match far less reliably than it wins a league season, and the gap between the first tier and the fifth, enormous over thirty-eight matches, narrows sharply over one. Add a heavy pitch, a crowd four feet from the touchline, a kick-off in poor light and a top-division manager resting half his first team, and the probability shifts again. The upset is not a miracle. It is the expected consequence of the format, occurring at roughly the rate the format predicts.
The FA has protected that format more carefully than it has protected anything else about the competition. The draw remains unseeded from the third round, which no comparable competition in European football can say. There is no attempt to keep the biggest clubs apart until the later rounds, no bracket, no protection for the holders. Two of the strongest sides in the country can be drawn together in January and one of them is out. Every proposal to change it — and there have been several, usually framed as protecting the value of the later rounds for broadcasters — has been rejected. It is the single best decision the FA has made about this competition in fifty years.
The qualifying rounds, which start in high summer with hundreds of clubs and run for six rounds before the first round proper, are where most of English football's participation in the competition happens and where almost none of the coverage goes. FA Cup qualifying rounds explained covers that end of it.
The competition's shifting place in the calendar
The FA Cup's status has been in slow decline relative to the league and to Europe since roughly the mid-1990s, and pretending otherwise helps nobody.
Several things happened at once. The Premier League's television money made league position the overwhelming financial priority. European qualification became worth more than a cup run. Squad sizes grew, which allowed managers to field weakened teams without embarrassment, and the fixture calendar tightened until something had to give. In 1999-2000 Manchester United withdrew from the competition entirely to play in a FIFA tournament in Brazil, at the FA's own encouragement, and the holders did not defend the cup for the first time in its history.
The FA has responded by rearranging the competition rather than by trying to restore its old position. Replays have been cut back sharply. Semi-finals moved permanently to Wembley in 2008, a decision driven by the need to service the debt on the rebuilt stadium and resented ever since by supporters who now travel to London twice and pay for the privilege. Kick-off times scatter across a weekend to suit broadcasters. How FA Cup draws are made has changed less than most of it.
The third-round entry point for the top two divisions dates from the mid-1920s and is itself a piece of managed decline. Before it, the biggest clubs entered earlier and played more ties. Giving them a bye to January reduced their fixture load and increased the number of rounds the smaller clubs played among themselves, which is why the modern competition has fourteen rounds in total and why a Step 5 club that goes all the way would need to win more matches than a Premier League club needs to win to lift the trophy. Nobody would design that from scratch. It grew.
What has not changed is the third round itself, when the top two divisions enter and the draw pairs clubs that have no business meeting. The FA Cup third round is the one weekend where the competition still does what Alcock designed it to do.
The counter-argument to the decline thesis deserves a hearing, because it is stronger than it looks. Weakened teams are not new — clubs have fielded reserve sides in this competition since the 1890s, whenever a league position or a replay clashed. The complaint that the cup mattered more in some earlier era is partly a complaint that television used to show less football. And the competition has continued to produce the results it is supposed to produce, at every level, in every decade, without anybody having to legislate for them.
Why it still carries weight
The argument that the FA Cup no longer matters usually comes from people looking at team sheets. Look at the ground instead.
A club at Step 4 of the pyramid that reaches the first round proper will have its biggest crowd in a decade, a television camera on a scaffold, and a windfall that pays for a stand. A supporter of a mid-table Premier League club with no realistic chance of a trophy has, in this competition, a route to one — six or seven matches, no group stage, no seeding, no aggregate. It is the only thing English football offers that is genuinely open at both ends.
And the day itself has proved durable in a way that the fixture list has not. Whatever the kick-off time, whatever the semi-final arrangements, a final between two English clubs at Wembley with a trophy older than every stadium in the country is still the thing a section of the crowd has waited a lifetime for. Alcock's committee could not have anticipated any of it. They were trying to give fifteen clubs something to play for. The rest of the England guides cover what grew out of that, from Wembley to the oldest football clubs in England, and if a tie ends level in any of the modern rounds, extra time and penalties settle it on the day.