In Defense of the Cup-tying Rule

In many competitions across Europe, players are "Cup-tied" each season, meaning that if you play for one team at one stage in the competition, you cannot play for another team later in the same competition. The focus of the rule is to keep the rich from getting richer by poaching players from teams already knocked out of the competition.

Mike Collet writes that it is time for the rule to go. While it would be unfair to presume, it would not suprise me if Collet is a Portsmouth FC fan. Pompey's Jermain Defoe is unable to play for Portsmouth in England's FA Cup Final against Cardiff City at Wembley in May because he played for Tottenham Hotspur earlier in the competition before coming to Pompey during the Winter Transfer Window. However, Defoe is able to play for Pompey in their English Premier League campaign, where PFC currently sit sixth in the table and are chasing a UEFA Cup slot.

Likewise in Europe, players who played for one team at one stage of the UEFA Champions League or UEFA Cup cannot play for another team in later stages of the same tournament, yet are allowed to play for their new clubs in their national league.

Collet says this is stupid to have one standard for cups and one standard for leagues. But in Collet's criticism lies its folly. Cups and leagues are entirely different competitions. If one team loses in a cup tie, they are out of the competition. No worries. It would have been nice to advance obviously, but it's not the end of the world. League play on the other hand carries with it the very real chance of relegation.

Teams in poor positions in league play have much less incentive to sell their players to the teams that advance (which more often than not, the teams that advance are higher in league play) due to the risk of relegation. In addition, to deny a player to participate in League play after joining a new team in the winter transfer window could mean him missing close to 20 games. Missing the Cup games means denying a footballer his trade only 3-5 times.

For these main distinguishing reasons, the cup-tying rule is good, and will affect only a handful of footballers each year, but in exchange, will allow the mid-level teams (and high-mid-level teams like Celtic, Porto, Benfica, PSV, and Olimpiacos) to keep their best players and grow as a team, rather than being glorified farm teams for a handful of conquering finalists.

Save the Wales

To say this season's FA Cup has been topsy-turvey would be an understatement. In English football's version of March Madness, Barnsley has done their best George Mason impression and have reached the last four by knocking off traditional powers Liverpool and Chelsea. With only one Premier League side left in the tournament (Portsmouth), the possibility that a European spot will go to a lower-division team is very real.

The winners of the FA Cup are granted a spot in the UEFA Cup.

Except....maybe they won't.

Another one of the last four to compete in the world's oldest knockout competition is Cardiff City. Yes, Cardiff is not in England, but rather in Wales. Wales (like Scotland and Northern Ireland) has their own league, but Cardiff plays in the English football pyramid because the Welsh league was not formed untill 1992. With no league to serve the club upon its founding in 1899, Cardiff City simply hopped the border and began play and developed rivalries with English sides.

Therein lies the dilemma for Cardiff. Financially strapped, the side could use an influx of cash that European competition would bring. But the FA of England will not grant them a spot because they are not an English team, and the Welsh FA will not grant them a spot because they are forbidden from competing in the League of Wales or the Welsh Cup (a sort of "back door" to Europe in the past for Cardiff).

This is not right. If Cardiff win the FA Cup, they should be given the right to test their mettle in Europe. Cardiff is the 9th-largest UK city competing in the English league system (Glasgow and Edinburgh furnish teams in the Scottish Premier League). If the FA wants to reap the television revenue and gate revenue from a team in a city like Cardiff, then they should be open to letting them take a spot in Europe should they play their way in, which Cardiff has certainly done. If they want the FA Cup to be an English-only cup, then kick Cardiff out. What is so difficult about this?

The US Open Cup is a competition that is only open to US teams, and since Toronto FC, Montreal Impact, and Vancouver Whitecaps are all based in Canada, they don't get to play. So they hold their own tournament (their version of the Welsh Cup, I guess) and use that as a route for qualifying to continental competitions.

Even AS Monaco FC, which is based in Monaco, gets to participate in the French league and cup, and have qualified for Europe, despite being from another country.

Let Cardiff in!!!!