Every year the question is asked: what is the point of the FA Cup, why should we care? This is not the Premier League, with its slick production values, glamorous stars at every turn and sense of dramatic urgency. There’s no great sense that it matters: you lose, you’re out and it has no bearing on the race for fourth. You win the thing and your manager still gets sacked a few days or weeks or months later – between 2012 and 2018, Arsène Wenger was the only FA Cup-winning manager still to be in his job a year later.
Yet it remains a tremendously democratic institution and, amid everything else – the landmark final, the money it diverts down the pyramid, the chance it offers smaller clubs for a day to mark indelibly in their history (the time we won at Burnley, the afternoon we drew with West Ham, the night we played at Everton …), it offers a reminder of games that used to be. And for fans of a certain age, disillusioned by the transformation of clubs into commercial vehicles or tools of soft power, nostalgia may be the most important thing we have left: it’s the only thing to look forward to – the past.
