Premier League reforms to the football calendar must benefit all clubs

Premier League clubs are meeting to discuss reforms to the calendar at a shareholders’ meeting. These must be for the benefit of all clubs.

Change is in the air. The weekend brought a report in The Times about proposed reforms to the FA Cup and the League Cup, which are due to be discussed at a meeting of the Premier League on Wednesday. But as ever in modern football, it would be simplistic to detach this from broader conversations that have been going on about the future of the game in the face of conflicting pressures, both from inside the game and out.

What is immediately noticeable about the proposals made is that Premier League clubs seem to need to be dragged kicking and screaming towards any sort of meaningful reform that doesn’t benefit them and them alone. It had been expected that there would be an independent regulator for football in this country with teeth, following the fan-led review into football governance in this country.

But a change of Prime Minister has brought a completely clean sweep through the corridors of power in government, and it’s reported that clubs are now planning more of a ‘wait and see’ attitude towards how much they offer in return for further concessions that will primarily benefit them and then alone.

Regardless of what PR statements come out, it should be pretty clear that the biggest clubs aren’t doing this out of any significant sense of solidarity with the rest of the game.

The focus of these latest reports is the two domestic cups, which have increasingly in recent years felt like something many clubs would rather not be involved in at all.

In the FA Cup, the suggestion is one that has been thrown around for years. It is said that third and fourth round replays could be scrapped for good from 2024, to coincide with Champions League reforms. Meanwhile in the League Cup, the talk is that clubs who qualify for European competitions should either be absent from it altogether or that they should be permitted to field under-21 teams.

The obvious losers in the scrapping of FA Cup replays would be smaller clubs who earn a replay by holding bigger clubs to a draw. This has almost come to resemble a crude form of financial distribution, albeit not a particularly fair one. For example, when then-National League side Exeter City drew Manchester United and held them to a goalless draw at Old Trafford, it was estimated that the money raised from the two fixtures – more than £750,000 – was sufficient to…