^{There are two FA Cups now. One ends in the third round, the other starts in the quarter-finals. Saturday’s final between Chelsea and Manchester City explains both.}

When Chelsea and Manchester City walk out at Wembley on Saturday afternoon, it’ll be the first time in the FA Cup’s 154-year history that these two clubs have met each other in the final. Between 2017 and 2026, every single FA Cup Final has featured either Chelsea or Manchester City. 10 consecutive finals, 2 clubs, never against each other until now.

Less remarkable is the fact that they are there at all. The two clubs have, between them, spent more on transfer fees than any pair of football clubs in history. Chelsea’s €4.3bn lifetime transfer outlay is the largest in the sport. City’s €3.4bn is second. Together that’s nearly €8bn on players, plus a comparable amount on wages. By the time Erling Haaland and Cole Palmer line up on Saturday, the cumulative spend behind their two squads will be larger than the GDP of several small economies.

The obvious question is whether the magic has gone out of the FA Cup. The honest answer is that there are two FA Cups now, and the magic has split between them. One ends in the third round. The other starts in the sixth.

The competition that ends in February

In the first FA Cup, the one that ends in early February, almost nothing has changed since 1872. 736 clubs entered the 2025-26 competition, beginning in August with the Extra Preliminary Round. Marine AFC of the eighth tier hosted Premier League Tottenham at home in the third round in 2021, and would have lost less heavily had the rain held off.

Lincoln City reached the quarter-finals as a fifth-tier side in 2017. Maidstone United, of the National League South, beat Championship Ipswich 2-1 in the 2023-24 fourth round, becoming the lowest-ranked side in the fifth round since 1978. Tamworth, of the National League, knocked Huddersfield out the following year.

These rounds are still the FA Cup many fans remember loving. Single match, anywhere in the country, an upset waiting to happen. The lower-tier club has the smaller pitch, the older stand, the harder weather, and a goalkeeper who sells double-glazing in the week. The bigger club has 11 internationals and a flight to catch.

The romance is in the knockout format, and what might unravel over 90 minutes. By February each year, 3 or 4 genuine upsets have happened, the lower-league giant-killers have had their moment on Match of the Day, and the FA Cup is creating memories that last a lifetime.

The competition that starts in March

The second FA Cup is closer to a Premier League playoff. Since 2015, almost every FA Cup semi-finalist has been a club from the upper half of the Premier League with a transfer budget in the hundreds of millions. The exceptions in the last decade fit on one hand: Watford in 2019, Brighton in 2023, Crystal Palace in 2025. The last time a non-Premier League club reached the final itself was Millwall in 2004.

Cup magic depends on small samples. By the time the field has narrowed to 8, then 4, then 2, the small-sample that allows Marine to host Tottenham has largely been removed. The favourites are still favourites, and over multiple rounds, the favourites mostly win.

Stefan Szymanski, the economist who co-wrote Soccernomics and now teaches at Michigan’s Ross School of Business after years at Bayes Business School in London, has spent more than two decades documenting how predictable football leagues are when you have the wage data.

His central finding, replicated across the English top two divisions, is that wage spending explains roughly 90% of league position over time. Higher salaries attract better players; better players win more matches; the table reflects the spend. In leagues, this correlation is so strong that financial models routinely outperform tactical ones as predictors of where teams will finish.

Szymanski has also shown that the correlation breaks down in cup competitions. In the early rounds of the FA Cup, the wage-position relationship is almost meaningless. Single matches with random matchups, weather, refereeing variance and one-off managerial decisions overwhelm the long-run effect of payroll. The further you progress, the more the variance settles. The semi-finals and finals reflect the spending. The third round does not.

The research catches up with the romance

The Birkbeck Sport Business Centre at the University of London has spent two decades studying competitive balance in English football. Recent work with Dr Christina Philippou at the University of Portsmouth has examined how financial regulation, parachute payments and revenue concentration shape what happens on the pitch. The pattern is consistent: every regulatory intervention designed to even out spending in the Championship has either failed or been gamed by clubs using parachute payments to subsidise rather than reduce their wage bills.

In the Premier League itself, the imbalance is sharper still. Liverpool, Arsenal and Manchester United each posted annual revenues of around £700m for 2024-25, with Chelsea and Man City in similar territory. The next tier of clubs operates on a fraction of that. When clubs with that kind of resource gap meet in a single match, the favoured side will usually win. When 64 clubs of varied size meet in a knockout draw, the small samples create variance the budget can’t fully absorb. Tthe FA Cup still shows that for a few weekends a year.

The 2025 final showed what happens when the variance survives all the way through. Crystal Palace, never the holders of a major trophy in their 119-year history, beat Manchester City 1-0 with a 16th-minute Eberechi Eze volley and a Dean Henderson penalty save in the second half.

City had spent more on Erling Haaland alone than Crystal Palace had spent on their entire starting XI. A sample of one match in front of 86,000 people produced exactly the kind of result that had not happened in a final since Wigan beat the same opposition 12 years earlier. Just for once the romance reached the Final.

Romantics and oligarchs on a Saturday afternoon

The 2026 final won’t deliver an upset on the same scale, since both finalists are billionaire clubs with large international squads. Will Manchester City’s 4th consecutive final yield their first FA Cup since 2023? Will Chelsea, in their first final since 2022, lift the trophy for the first time since 2018? Will Cole Palmer or Erling Haaland produce the moment? These are good questions of the kind asked about Liverpool versus City in late spring: high-quality professional theatre, fully briefed by a global betting market.

Marine, Lincoln, Maidstone and Tamworth have already done their work for the season. The romance arrived in January, was televised on the BBC, and went home. The second FA Cup, the one that has been increasingly dominated by the same handful of clubs for the past decade is the one playing on Saturday.

February is for the romantics. May is for the oligarchs.

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