The third round of the FA Cup, underway this weekend, is one of the highlights of the football calendar – or so we are meant to think. Premier League and Championship clubs finally enter the fray, prompting breathless talk of part-time bricklayers and plumbers getting to test their skills against elite footballers paid millions. The tantalising prospect is held up of an elite manager – think  Pep Guardiola of Manchester City – patrolling the touchline at some tiny lower league ground. This is all part and parcel of the endless  hyperbole and romanticism surrounding this oldest of cup competitions, often accompanied by seemingly endless drooling over previous acts of ‘giant-killing’ in the competition. Much of this – if not quite all – is somewhat deluded football propaganda of a North Korean vintage. The usual suspects, the broadcasters paying to cover the games, the TV presenters and pundits, continue to insist on the ‘glory’ and ‘specialness’ of the cup. This merely camouflages a more unpalatable truth: the competition matters little to football’s big clubs and the money masters in charge of the game.

An automatic Champions League spot would make winning the FA Cup important once more

The third-round cup action got going on Thursday evening in the game between Crystal Palace and Everton at Selhurst Park. Did you know it happened? It is hard to think of a duller game. Both teams have played each other regularly in the Premier League over recent years, and even now it is hard to discern any particular rivalry.  ITV chose to broadcast it on ITV4, which says it all. Another 31 – mostly dull fixtures – will take place between now and Monday. One ‘standout’ tie is  Arsenal and Liverpool going head to head. Expect the word ‘mouth-watering’ to crop up. There will be much talk about ‘iconic’ cup finals between these two teams in the past – the Charlie George goal in 1971 and so on. Even the fact that Arsenal will wear an all-white kit at home for  the first time in their 138-year history will somehow be brought into play (removing the red is part of the club’s campaign against knife crime and youth violence), proving only that even the FA Cup is not immune to football’s determination to signal its awareness of every wider social issue outside the game.  None of this will serve to disguise the routine nature of the tie itself. The two teams  played each other just before Christmas in the Premier League (a 1-1 draw), a much more important fixture altogether. Just don’t expect anyone involved to admit it though. Shades of North Korea again. Anyone who points out the obvious truth that the emperor has no clothes must be taken out and shot.

Simply put, the FA Cup is a shadow of what it used to be, a competition in terminal decline. All the hyperbole in the world will not save it. Once upon a time, long, long ago, it was a prize of equal stature to winning the league and coverage of the final was ‘event television’ across the whole day. The game has moved on. The big clubs play the competition because they are obliged to. They see it as a way of utilising their squads and giving vital rest to key players, who must be saved for the much more important Premier League and European games.

Like so much in football it comes down to money. It is estimated that Manchester City, last season’s Treble winners,  made more than £250 million pounds from winning the Premier League, the Champions League and the FA Cup: only some £4 million of that came from winning the cup final at Wembley. No prizes then for guessing which competitions matter the most. Those in charge of the Football Association need to address the dwindling relevance of their premier cup competition and soon. One way would be to increase substantially the prize pot so as to incentivise the big clubs to take it seriously again. An even more radical idea  is to push  for the FA Cup winners to be allowed automatic entry  into the Champions League. At the moment the winners can land a place in certain and specific circumstances, if they have some European pedigree. That’s unfair, like so much in football, on some of the historically  less successful teams. An automatic Champions League spot would make winning the FA Cup important once more. It might even save it.