In our post on league structure, I mentioned that soccer leagues tend not to have playoffs determine championships as American sports do. Instead, league titles are decided through the regular season. Instead of playoffs, nearly every national league has a Cup title, which is the second trophy a team can win in a season, though it is usually considered less prestigious than winning the league title. In this article, we'll discuss how Cup competitions work, and how they differ from the classic concept of the playoffs.
A league's cup is a knockout competition played over the course of the entire season. Generally, a large body of teams is eligible to compete. Unlike in American sports, where the best teams at the end of the regular season get into the playoffs, all teams are entered into cup competition. The English FA cup, for example, automatically enters all teams in the top four tiers and also many of the clubs in the next six, for a competition with over 600 contestants. In Germany the DFB Pokal admits all of the clubs in the first two tiers and a selection of other teams for 64 entrants. The Coupe de France, one of France's two cups, admits essentially any team willing to play in France or it's territories; in recent years over 7500 clubs have participated!
As with other competitions of this type in soccer, teams are seeded based on their standing in the league pyramid. The lower you are, the more matches you have to play to get to the final. For example, in the FA cup Premiere League teams (tier 1 of English football) start in the ninth round of the competition (out of 14 rounds total), while the smallest clubs have to play five qualifying rounds just to get into the competition proper. Teams in each round are randomly drawn, including the location of each match in single knockout formats. If you win, you move onto the next round, are given a new opponent, and continue. If you lose, you're out.
Because these are knockout competitions, ties are not allowed. Most of the time a draw is resolved first either with a replay of the game at the away team's stadium, and then a penalty shootout if needed, or just a penalty shootout. Winning the cup usually gives a team entry to the Europa league, the less prestigious of the European leagues.
The matches are played in gaps in the fixture list, usually on a weekday night between weekend match days. They are timed to run concurrently with the regular season, with the start of cup competitions coinciding with the league season start, and the cup final coinciding with the end of the league season.
Due to the fact that these competitions are usually single knockout, they have a reputation for generating giant-killers who get a little lucky against bigger and better squads and knock them out of the competition. This year (2015) Chelsea, one of the best clubs in the world and likely winner of the Premier League title, lost at home 2-4 to tiny little Bradford city of League One, the third tier in English football. While a team has to be consistently good to win the league title, far fewer matches are played in Cup competitions and so there is higher variance, allowing smaller clubs to advance further in the competition.
Most countries have one cup competition. In England and France there are two, the second of which is more closed off and only allows high-level professional teams to compete. Most leagues have single knockout competitions, sometimes with two-legged semi-finals. In Spain all matches are played home and away.
List of cups in the biggest countries:
England: FA (Football association) cup and the Football League cup.
France: Coupe de France (Anyone can play) and the Coupe de la Ligue (Only professional sides can play)
Germany: DFB Pokal
Spain: Cope del Ray
Italy: Coppa Italia
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