Column

Culture

Football

Sport

17 February 2025

4 min read

FA Cup magic: the cliches that belie football’s real focus

Selfish interests are a symptom of a wider social tendency.

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

in a dressing room, celebrating footballer crowd together for a photograph.

Plymouth's players celebrate.

Plymouth Argyle FC

I learned about a concept called ‘thought-terminating clichés’ recently. They’re throw-away phrases often used in cults and cult-like social phenomena as a way of shutting down debate. So, for example, if you’re chatting with, say, an anti-vaxxer, they might say “you need to go and do your research” as way to shut down the debate.

Once you notice this, you see it everywhere. And there was one ‘thought-terminating cliché’ I heard a lot this weekend. “The magic of the cup.”

Can I be honest with you? I don’t like the FA Cup. This weekend saw the latest round of cup fixtures and all it did was remind me why. Okay yes, I’m still a bit miffed about Plymouth knocking Liverpool out. But that’s not it, I promise.

Every single time these weekends come around it inevitably ends up with lots of tedious discussion about ‘The magic of the cup’ as people get starry-eyed and nostalgic about ‘giant-killings’ and the tragic loss of FA Cup replays.

For example, in the last round of cup fixtures, National League team Tamworth took Premier League club Tottenham Hotspur to extra time. They ultimately lost 3-0 but, in previous years, they would have ‘earned’ a reply at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium and, as a result would have gained more money in gate receipts than the club normally generates in a whole year.

For some, it was proof that scrapping FA Cup replays was damaging grassroots and lower league football. Nobody seemed to care about the fact that Tamworth only scraped through the previous round on penalties, precisely because there were no replays in the cup this year. In other words, they were only playing Spurs because the replays were scraped in the first place.

Discussions like this can be – should be – a good opportunity for the footballing community to have honest conversations about what the sport ought to look like. Who is football for? What is the point of football? How should the sport’s resources be distributed across the football pyramid?

But of course, as is so often the case in contemporary society, we are simply unable to have an open, transparent, and well-intentioned conversation about these fundamental issues. In particular, one discussion caught my eye over the weekend.

Debate around VAR shows how deeply ingrained tribalism is within football: I would rather my team won unjustly rather than lost fairly.

A lot has been said about VAR since its introduction to the premier league in 2019. Many have lamented its impact. No longer is it possible to simply celebrate a goal. Now there’s always the VAR, always threatening to take away that last minute winner for some small infraction that occurred 5 minutes before the goal was actually scored. All VAR has done, so say the critics, is give greater power to the incompetent referees and their mates.

And the damage of VAR was only proved this weekend in the FA Cup, as this was the last round of fixtures not to have VAR before its introduction in the fifth round.

Fans were able to celebrate goals without worrying that the Grinch With A Whistle was going to take it away. No longer would we have to sit twiddling our thumbs while three men in Stockley Park used a magnifying glass and a series of made-up lines to work out if someone’s little toe was offside. Let joy be unconfined!

And yet, there were loads of officiating errors over the weekend. Blackburn had a goal ruled out against Wolves for offside; Dominic Hyam looked on. Brighton beat Chelsea; Tariq Lamptey looked to have handled the ball. Manchester United scored a dramatic last-minute winner against Leicester City; scorer Harry Maguire almost certainly looked offside. There were multiple other incidents we could reference; you get the point.

But this is all just a small price to pay; it’s The Magic of the Cup after all. And this is where football needs to decide what it’s fundamentally all about. Is it a sport, a competition? Or is it entertainment?

It can, of course, be both – and most of the time it is. But if we decide that football is to remain fundamentally a sport and not completely concede the point that it is now entirely a TV product, then VAR has to be here to stay. My minor inconvenience when I prematurely celebrate a disallowed goal, or sit in a freezing stadium not knowing what VAR is doing, all this is the price we pay for ensuring competitive rigour.

Debate around VAR shows how deeply ingrained tribalism is within football: I would rather my team won unjustly rather than lost fairly. As in so many aspects of life, loyalty to ‘my team’ blinds me from what is best for those around me. Football’s inability to ‘solve’ the perennial problem of the FA Cup, what it’s fundamentally for, and how VAR is best implemented into it, is just a symptom of a wider social tendency towards self-interest over equity and justice.

Sometimes, winning as a collective involves losing as an individual. Sometimes the best thing for football is seeing that last-minute winner rightly ruled off, embarrassing though it may be. The Magic of the Cup indeed.

Join with us - Behind the Seen

Seen & Unseen is free for everyone and is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you’re enjoying Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Alongside other benefits (book discounts etc.), you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing what I’m reading and my reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin

Editor-in-Chief

Find out more and sign up

Explainer

Belief

Culture

Leading

Wisdom

7 May 2025

4 min read

As the Conclave begins, why does the Pope matter today?

The personal, vivid link to the origins of the movement that changed the world.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

An Anglican bishop wearing purple shakes hands with the Pope.

The author meeting the late Pope, 2024.

So, the conclave begins. There is something about the way popes are elected that captures the imagination. Whoever dreamt up the idea of black smoke for ‘no decision’, and white smoke for ‘habemus papam’ – ‘we have a new pope’ - was a genius at marketing. So much better than a press release or a tweet from the Vatican X account.

The conclave was brought to our imagination so vividly by the recent film with Ralph Fiennes. We love the idea of secret debates, intrigue, people locked away from the world until they come to a decision with arcane ancient rituals and an uncertain outcome. Was there ever a film whose release was better timed?

There are also the sheer numbers involved. There are approximately 1.4 billion Catholics in the world today – roughly the same as the population of India and China, the world most populous nations. Yet the identity of the new pope is of matters to the rest of us too. The leader of China of India is of interest especially to people living in China or India, but maybe less so for those of us who don’t. The new pope is the head of churches round the corner from where you live, or of people with whom you work, or, if you are Catholic yourself, your own spiritual leader. This appointment matters.

Yet it’s not just the optics, the drama, the numbers. And it’s not just for Catholics either. I am an Anglican, and since the Reformation of the sixteenth century, we have had in our own 39 Articles the statement: “The Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this Realm of England.” That might seem to settle the matter that it’s of no interest to English Protestants. But that would be wrong.

I met Pope Francis once. It was at a gathering of Anglican Archbishops in Rome last year. We all were led through magnificent Vatican corridors into an imposing state room, adorned with fantastic frescoes, where the white-robed Holy Father was brought in on his wheelchair to deliver a brief 20-minute homily to us all.

It was a good talk, thoughtful, well-constructed, but in many ways unremarkable. It didn’t say anything much that I hadn’t heard from other sources. Yet somehow this was different. His words carried a weight, a gravity that went beyond the content of the lecture itself. It was as if, when he entered that room, he carried with him two thousand years of church history.

The line of Bishops of Rome goes back to St Peter, the gruff, unschooled fisherman who Jesus called from his mundane life to become an apostle, and who then on, was so captured by the person of Jesus that he gave his life in the cause. I left that room conscious of the weight of the office of the papacy, even if I don’t recognise him as my direct spiritual father.

Listening to this successor of St Peter felt like you were listening to one of the friends of Jesus – and this was not just the personal quality of the man himself, but something about the office he occupied. It was a personal, vivid link to the origins of the Christian movement, the first stirrings of the revolution.

The papacy is one of those unique things in modern life - an umbilical link to the past.

Of course, there have been some pretty terrible occupants of the papal see, whose personal lives showed scant evidence of any knowledge of, or relationship with Jesus. The sixteenth century Roderigo Borgia (Pope Alexander VI) comes to mind, who despite the rule on clerical celibacy, had several children from various mistresses, won the Papacy by bribing cardinals, and made his favourite son bishop of several lucrative sees at the age of eighteen, and a cardinal at nineteen. So, there is nothing automatic about this – which is why the Protestant Reformers denied the idea of any blanket automatic papal authority.

Yet when a person of evident holiness is combined with this notion of the weight of the office, the papacy becomes a gift to all of us, linking us back to the earliest followers of Jesus – even to Jesus himself.

The papacy is one of those unique things in modern life - an umbilical link to the past. Monarchies do something similar – linking us to the past through the long line of kings and queens of England, Denmark, Spain or wherever, yet more often than not, the events they lead us back to, the process by which those families took power, reveal murky politics, bribery and bloody battles.

This is a line in history that links us to the event that, if Tom Holland’s Dominion is to be believed, has had more impact in shaping western culture than any other – the remarkable life, death and resurrection of Jesus – a radical life full of love, self-giving and transformative power – for both individuals and whole civilisations. And for that, whether we are Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, or even, perhaps, unbeliever, we might raise a prayer - or a glass - of thanksgiving.