The EFL Cup Is Outdated and Should Be Scrapped

In most cases it most likely doesn’t happen this way, but for the sake of imagery it’s convenient to envisage every Premier League manager sitting down ahead of a new season and drawing up a list of priorities. Certain clubs have the Premier League title at the top of the docket, others have Champions League qualification. But where does the EFL Cup sit on that list?

It might be a cup competition, but its stature and significance finds itself firmly in the shadow of the FA Cup. If managers target a cup run it is in the most romantic cup competition in European football, not the tournament that schedules its final midway through the club season. 

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Does anyone go into a new campaign targeting success in the EFL Cup?

There’s a certain coldness to the competition that, for all that the FA Cup has suffered a decline over the past few decades, is not an accusation that could ever be angled at English football’s other cup tournament. The EFL Cup feels manufactured, artificial.

It is a competition without an essence, without a clear selling point. Why does it even exist in the first place?

In its current form, in the current footballing climate, it feels like a political pawn in the power struggle at the top of the English game. That was underlined by the rebranding of the competition to the EFL Cup for this season, aligning it with the rebranding of the lower-league structure to the EFL. That made it clear who the competition belongs to, pressing the finger firmly into the eye of the Premier League and The FA.

But ignoring politics, is there any real need for the EFL Cup or any cup competition other than the FA Cup? Most footballing countries make do with a single cup competition. In Spain, they only have the Copa del Rey; in Italy, it’s the Coppa Italia; in Germany, it’s the DFB-Pokal. They get by with handing out just one cup every season, so why can’t England do the same?

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It’s time the EFL Cup was binned. It never served a true purpose, but now it is actively counter-productive. It’s possible the FA Cup would restore a degree of its former aura with no rival competition to muddle its schedule and cross the lines. There might even be a positive impact on the English national team as a result of scrapping the EFL Cup, with the country’s top players afforded more time to rest without additional, meaningless fixtures to be played.

And yet so many immediately dismiss the notion that the competition should be ditched. They say the EFL Cup gives clubs another chance to distinguish themselves, particularly lower-league clubs. But does that differentiate it at all from the FA Cup? Isn’t that the very ethos of the FA Cup, the spiritual home of the David-versus-Goliath battle, of the cup upset?

All this gives the EFL Cup something of an image problem. It is positioned nowhere in particular, somewhere between the FA Cup and the Community Shield as a second-tier competition. A consolation prize, even if the Wembley final and ticker-tape podium for the winners gives the impression of genuine significance. None of it matters much.

Could you, for instance, ring off the winners of the competition over the past 10 years? Everyone remembers who won the Premier League title a decade ago, but what about the League Cup, or the Worthington Cup, or the Carling Cup, or the Capital One Cup, or the EFL Cup, or whatever it was called at that time? Could you even with absolute certainly recall who played in last season’s final and what the final score was?

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Over the years, the EFL Cup has produced few, if any, moments of note or landmark. Great competitions are defined by the drama they generate, but has English football’s second cup tournament contributed in any meaningful way to the grand folklore of the country’s game? There have been good games, of course, but nothing of any great legend.

Instead, clubs—Premier League clubs in particular—play the EFL Cup like some sort of favour to the rest of the English league structure. They use it as a testing ground for young talent, with Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger prolific in bleeding new talent into the Gunners first-team fold in the competition. That’s how lowly elite clubs consider the EFL Cup. It’s used to develop young talent rather than secure silverware.

They have a league cup competition in France called the Coupe de la Ligue. There are questions over its true purpose as well, but only four wins are needed to win the trophy, compared with the six needed to win the EFL Cup. At least French clubs are afforded a few free weeks in their schedule.

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Some might claim that scrapping the EFL Cup would hit those in the lower leagues harder than those at the top of the game, and there is a certain truth to that. Smaller clubs benefit from bigger clubs visiting for one-off cup clashes, like Northampton Town did from Manchester United’s trip to Sixfields Stadium on Wednesday night, but are these fixtures really anything more than glorified exhibition games?

These are not quintessential David-versus-Goliath tussles, because frequently Goliath has tied one of his own arms behind his back. 

Besides the financial benefit to some EFL clubs, it’s difficult to decipher what good the EFL Cup does for the English domestic game. It breaks up the momentum of the Premier League and league seasons while placing unnecessary strains on players, coaches, teams in general. And all for what? For a piece of silverware that nobody truly cares about.

This year's draw, which has pitted Manchester United and Manchester City—as well as Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur—against each other at the round-of-16 stage will pique interest in the competition, but that will be as a result of the rivalries between those clubs, rather than the context of the tournament itself.

Fundamentally, sporting competitions matter because everybody participating wants to win it. Is that the case with the EFL Cup? Sure, no club would complain were the competition’s trophy to end up in their hands at Wembley, but is there that irrepressible urge to win it that makes sport what it is? Would anyone care if it was ditched? They shouldn’t.