FA Cup talent proves how the English football pyramid has slowly flattened

Matt Smith got as close as it is possible to get without quite making it. He joined Arsenal at the age of seven, progressing through the club’s academy system in an age cohort that in time came to include Emile Smith Rowe, Folarin Balogun and Dan Ballard. He was part of a team which reached the FA Youth Cup final in 2018. Smith started the first leg. He was replaced, after an hour or so, by Bukayo Saka.

He was good enough to make the next step, too. Smith was one of a select few youth players summoned to join first-team training by Mikel Arteta after the pandemic shutdown. In the summer of 2020, he was named as a substitute for the FA Cup final. He sat with Saka, Joe Willock and Reiss Nelson. Only one of their number, Eddie Nketiah, made it on to the pitch, but they were all awarded a medal.

At that point, Smith’s story would diverge just a little from those of his peers. Saka, of course, is a bona fide superstar, but most of the others have established themselves in the game’s most exclusive competitions. Ballard, Nketiah, Nelson, Smith Rowe and Willock are all Premier League players. Balogun has a Champions League play-off in his immediate future, and a World Cup on the horizon.

Smith has built an impressive career for himself, too, albeit in slightly less rarefied surroundings. On Sunday, he will play in midfield for Wigan Athletic – currently battling relegation from League One – when they visit the Emirates in the FA Cup. Smith will, at long last, have the chance to play on that pitch in a senior game. It may not be quite as he imagined it, but he will get to realise his dream.

It is precisely the sort of quirk of fate that the FA Cup has a particular habit of producing, and exactly the kind of story that the media has always eagerly gobbled up. What it actually illustrates, though, is something quite different: not the chasm that exists between the leagues, but how fine football’s margins can be.

This weekend’s fourth-round ties offer countless similar stories to Smith’s. Wigan could, conceivably, name a team at the Emirates that includes alumni of the academy systems at Liverpool, Everton, Tottenham, Fulham, Crystal Palace and Bournemouth. Grimsby’s squad contains graduates from Arsenal, West Ham and Manchester United, as well as Jude Soonsup-Bell, who played for both Spurs and Chelsea.

The point holds true all the way to Macclesfield. Although they are in many ways atypical of a sixth-tier side – a phoenix club, their growth supercharged by the largesse of their benefactor, Rob Smethurst – the calibre of their players remains striking.

Max Woltman played for Liverpool at San Siro in the Champions League. Cameron Borthwick-Jackson played in the Premier League for Manchester United. Isaac Buckley-Ricketts, scorer of the goal that helped beat Crystal Palace in the third round, spent seven years at Manchester City. Their victory that day was, of course, still the biggest shock in the FA Cup’s rich history. But that Buckley-Ricketts was unfazed by Palace’s quality should not, really, have been surprising at all.

“What’s brilliant about the English pyramid is that you can go to the sixth tier and it’s an incredible standard of football,” said Luke Matheson, who scored at Old Trafford as a 16-year-old while at Rochdale and now finds himself at Macclesfield. “When I came, I was surprised at how good the standard actually is.”

That is not to say there is no gap in quality between the Premier League elite and the lower-tier teams they face in the earlier rounds of the FA Cup, that Grimsby should beat Wolves on Sunday or that Salford should be condemned for being obliterated by Manchester City at the Etihad. Nor is it to diminish the idea of the magic of the Cup; an upset, especially on the scale of Macclesfield’s, is still rare and precious.

But it is inarguable that the tournament’s underdogs are not as they might once have been imagined. The lower leagues are no longer the exclusive preserve of journeymen. Their teams are increasingly drawn instead from the swollen ranks of players who did not quite cut it at the elite level. In many cases, that may not be because of a lack of talent. Some may have been derailed by injury, or bad luck. Others might have lacked maturity, or patience, or the right advice.

Most, though, fell foul of the challenge laid out by Smith in an interview with The Athletic in 2024. “It is a sink-or-swim environment,” he said. At a club like Arsenal, “you’ve got to be better than the guy in your position, no matter how old they are”. His task, in effect, was to take Granit Xhaka’s place in the team. It is a lot to ask of a 20-year-old.

Even those players who have not fallen off the Premier League’s industrialised production line have, in many cases, benefited from the highest-quality coaching from a young age. Of the 72 clubs in the EFL, 67 have their own academies. More teams are pouring ever increasing amounts of resources into developing their own players, Nick Craig, the EFL’s chief operating officer, said: more than £100 million, on top of the funding they receive from grants.

“We’re seeing a lot of teams making the push to go from Category 3 to Category 2, which is a big leap,” he said. “It’s a serious undertaking for clubs, but they recognise the value of it.” 

The reality of youth development, he stressed, is complex: it is an over-simplification to suggest that England’s production of talent is now so prolific that it has transformed the level of player available to clubs in the EFL and below. Premier League teams, after all, still pay a premium to recruit the finest prospects. Should any of those players later return to the EFL, it comes at the cost of a loan or a transfer fee.

The overall effect, though, is hard to deny. This weekend, the FA Cup will give dozens of players like Smith an opportunity to prove to themselves – to everyone – that if the circumstances had been right, they might have been giants, too.

Photograph by David Price/Arsenal FC via Getty Images