The Premier League could take greater control of its calendar should a deal to acquire the international rights for the FA Cup be given the green light.
As reported last week by SportBusiness and the Times, the Football Association performed a U-turn in its talks with Swiss agency Infront over acquiring the international rights for the world’s oldest cup competition, with the Premier League revealed as being the party with who the FA were in advanced discussions with over a £100m per year deal from 2024 to 2028.
The idea behind the Premier League bidding for the rights, which are currently held by global sports marketing firm IMG, is that they could sell the FA Cup rights alongside the enormously lucrative Premier League rights, currently worth £5bn internationally, or separately to deliver values greater than the current sum of their parts.
SportBusiness claims that the deal could be agreed as early as next week, and while the deal would avoid a potential reduction in the value of the rights, plugging a predicted shortfall for the FA and maintaining prize money across the competition, the benefits for the Premier League in having a greater say on the football calendar are clear.
Potential upside for Premier League clubs, where a number of the top sides have expressed concern over the congested nature of the domestic fixture list, include the possibility of moving some rounds to midweek and scrapping replays after the third round.
With the Premier League looking towards increasing the number of games available for broadcast, and with the potential to free up some weekends where FA Cup games have been switched to midweek, that would present the League with the chance to earn greater revenue from its domestic and international rights, something that is the key component of revenue generation for the Premier League’s member clubs. At present, the 20 member clubs receive an equal share of £80.7m from both domestic and international rights per season, while facilities fees (the amount of times a club features in a live broadcast) and merit payments for where a team finishes adds from between £13.4m (based on 2021/22 figures for Norwich City) and £66.5m (based on 2021/22 figures for Manchester City).
The proposals have been met with a warning from some quarters, though, with the possibility of handing over such power over the football calendar a concern. One source told the Times earlier this month that it was potentially the ‘worst decision’ for the FA since they bowed to pressure from the biggest clubs in 1992 to form the Premier League, the most seismic moment in English football pyramid to date.
Labour MP Clive Efford, who sits on the Culture, Media and Sport committee which took evidence from the FA and the Premier League on football regulation in March, told PA: "The Premier League has shown its contempt for the FA Cup in the past.
“Why would anyone who has any concern about the future of the FA Cup put the Premier League in charge of it?
“(The FA Cup) is not a competition that (Premier League clubs) value. They prefer the Premier League, the Champions League, that’s what it boils down to. The FA Cup will be forever diminished. We (the CMS committee) can ask football to come in and talk to us about it, if we choose to do it.
“I think this is a big issue – it’s the death knell of the FA Cup and the status of the FA Cup.”
