Sixteen teams head into this weekend’s fifth round of the FA Cup, their fans celebrating shortening odds of a Wembley semi-final appearance and, in turn, final glory.
Most will be oblivious to the £2m prize for the ultimate winners of the trophy. Club owners will likely consider this a paltry reward in itself, although broadcast revenues from a cup run and the lure of a Europa League place are handy augmentations.
Prize money is a distorting determinant in a world increasingly under the influence of wannabe sporting powers, both sovereign states and financial moguls.
As the sums on offer to competition organisers, club owners, athletes and their agents swell, it is no surprise that heritage events come under pressure to choose whether to ante up or risk a slide into second-rate status.
For those of us who will never be blessed with elite athletic abilities, the thought of winning, say, Wimbledon, the Open or a final at Wembley might appear motivation enough to knuckle down and chase the dream if one had the requisite skills.
But relentlessly, year by year, the direct financial rewards for success in pinnacle events inflate. Such is the power of competition within sports.
Grand slam tournaments need to ensure they continue to sit above the rest of the calendar. Lesser events without the cachet of history may offer bigger prizes, but the traditional leaders must offer sufficient rewards such that – when combined with the kudos (and consequent commercial benefits) of victory – they remain on top of a sport’s status pyramid.
LIV Golf may offer riches beyond those many of those available on the established tours, but its contracted golfers still want access to the four major tournaments. Would they if the majors only paid peanuts though?
Winner’s prize money sampled
Wimbledon £2.7m. Six Kings Slam $6m
ICC Men’s Champions Trophy $2.2m. IPL $2.3m
Super Bowl $171,000 per player. NBA Cup $500,000 per player
World Darts £500,000. World Snooker £500,000
World Athletics $70,000. World Aquatics $20,000
The Masters $3.6m. Each LIV Golf event $4m
Champions League €25m. Premier League £62m
World Chess $2.5m. World Monopoly $20,580 (equal to the total money in the board game)
A $3m reward for the winner of last year’s Open golf is hardly peanuts. After all, it exceeds the FA Cup winner’s purse. The Olympics, by contrast, has got away with paying no prize money at all until, at Paris last summer, track and field gold medals triggered $50,000 payments from World Athletics.
The International Olympic Committee has long taken advantage of the minority status of most of the constituent sports in the Games. Athletes have few opportunities to win cash prizes elsewhere, but Olympic success is a possible (but far from guaranteed) route to celebrity status that might be monetised.
The fuss about the interest (or lack of) shown by leading golfers, tennis players and (some) US basketball stars is but a side show. Fifty grand would hardly make a difference to their bank accounts. Next up, the world’s leading cricketers in Los Angeles.
Owners of heritage sporting assets cannot afford to rest on their storied pasts to secure the goodwill of athletes.
If Seb Coe is elected president of the IOC next month, expect prize money to follow for all Olympic sports in relatively short order. But even if he fails to secure power, his initiative at World Athletics has created a fissure in the IOC’s business model through which cash will surely pour into athletes’ wallets.
An Olympic Games in America represents an opportunity to secure sponsorship for the payment of prize money that will appeal to Trumpian commercial instincts. If that transpires, then Saudi Arabia will be further emboldened in bidding to host a future Olympics, cranking up the ‘cash for medals’ rewards to conjure up a groundswell of athlete support.
The Saudis’ appetite for football as a centrepiece of its sporting strategy is well understood, and will only grow ahead of the 2034 World Cup. With so much money at its disposal, the state must look upon the FA Cup and equivalent competitions in football’s ’first world’ and wonder whether it could subvert them to its interests.
Take the EFL’s Carabao Cup, for instance. The organisation is bogged down in negotiations with the Premier League over the flow of money down English football’s professional pyramid. Its leading cup competition has a winner’s prize of just £100,000. Oh, and a place in Uefa’s Conference League.
Little wonder that the leading clubs typically field weakened teams in the Carabao Cup. And yet its last 11 winners have been drawn exclusively from Manchester City, Manchester United, Chelsea and Liverpool. Each time they beat Premier League opponents in the final.
Imagine, remembering that backdrop, a Gulf state ‘buying’ the right to host the Carabao Cup final, and possibly its semi-finals too. Doubtless it would find a tame local commercial partner to pay handsomely for naming rights to the competition, easing Carabao to one side. How big might the state be prepared to make the prizes for the last four teams in the competition?
How much, too, might it be prepared to pay the EFL each year for the privilege? £50m? £100m? Think what that could do to ease the financial challenges of the 72 non-Premier League clubs who enter the cup each season with little realistic prospect of a Wembley final appearance.
Lowest hanging fruit? The FA Community Shield, played without prize money to raise funds for the wider game. Why not take it overseas to crank up the proceeds? Italy’s Supercoppa is played around the world, most recently in Riyadh.
Such a thought may appear heretical, but the Football Association and EFL – and equivalent organisations in other sports – need to challenge themselves to find sources of income to cement the futures of their heritage competitions.
After all, an FA Cup win has not spared two recent Man Utd managers from the axe. Fans’ dreams of walking up Wembley Way are clearly shaky foundations on which to plan a financially secure future.
Wallow in this five minute film of the first FA Cup Final at Wembley in 1923, ‘The White Horse Final’. Bolton 2 West Ham 0. Here’s the link.
Ed Warner is chair of GB Wheelchair Rugby and writes his sport column at sportinc.substack.com