I am not quite sure what all those people who want to modernise the FA Cup are really after. We could make it more prestigious by inviting all the champions of Europe to compete in a sort of hybrid league and knockout competition.
Or we could — here’s an idea — make it more reliable by splitting the competitors into divisions, making everyone play everyone else and awarding points instead of having a knockout.
Or we could — here’s a better idea — just leave the bleedin’ thing alone.
Pure knockouts harness football’s natural unpredictability to ensure charm and excitement. But they mean that the winner is much less likely to be the best team than a league does.
It makes the tournament more risky for big clubs and, perhaps, less prestigious as a result. This is all just in the maths of it and it can’t be removed. Fiddling won’t help.
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So where are we now with the Cup? With Chelsea out, and Manchester United drawn to play Arsenal, how do the probabilities look?
Dr Henry Stott, Dr Ian Graham and Dr Mark Latham have been running the numbers.
The Fink Tank FA Cup modelling begins with the past two seasons of goals and shots on goal in all games, Cup and non-Cup.
The figures are weighted so that the most recent results count most heavily. This produces a ranking and allows us to calculate the probability of different outcomes in any tie you could dream up.
Using the draw for the coming round, we then simulate the competition thousands of times. We record the proportion of times a club win the tournament and give this as their probability of Cup Final glory.
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This exercise immediately shows the scale of Chelsea’s disappointment. It wasn’t so much that they failed to win the tournament. They were favourites, sure they were, and had a 25 per cent chance of lifting the trophy again. But that also meant they had a 75 per cent chance of not winning the trophy.
The disappointment is their early elimination. They had an 80 per cent chance of getting farther than they did.
You might think that United are now the best bet to win the Cup. They are as good as Arsenal, and at home, making them favourites to win the tie and triumph overall.
But they aren’t the best bet. Reading are. Although it’s highly unlikely that they will win the trophy, the bookies think it more unlikely still, giving good value. (We think there’s a 4.6 per cent chance of Reading lifting the Cup; the bookies think it’s 2 per cent.) And as for unpredictability, there’s a 70 per cent chance that one of the big three remaining will end as up winners.