Narrative overload: FA Cup final is a domestic finale ripe with storylines

N ow for the big series-ender. You have to hand it to the FA Cup. Football’s grand old patrician knockout pot may have grown a little mildewed and liver-spotted with age. But, like some geriatric sovereign stepping out from the shadows and striding the shopfloors one last time, it still knows how to twitch the threads. Saturday’s final at Wembley already looks like that rarest of things, a genuine multilayered epic.

At the end of a season that seems to have been going on for at least three years, when so many storylines have faded in and out, fractured by the outage at its centre, here is an end note to the domestic calendar that comes prepacked with fat, wet, impossibly ripe storylines. Power, succession, legacy. A heritage-gold 3pm kick-off. Frankly the Cup hasn’t looked so vital or hip in years.

That feeling of narrative overload is present even in the staging and the dramatis personae. The FA Cup was founded in 1871 as a first attempt at codification, at imposing governance, rules and discipline. Basically, this is a competition born out of the Victorian urge to make sure everyone is playing by the same rules. Fast forward to the present day and in the sky-blue corner we have potential Cup winners with 115 charges of financial and administrative misconduct hanging over them. Perhaps this is football’s idea of dramatic irony.

Manchester City, of course, deny breaking the rules. City’s supporters, who have the chance to boo not one governing body but two in the next couple of weeks, make the point that these rules shouldn’t exist in the first place and therefore deserve to be broken.

It is at least an impressive on-brand, dictator-level approach to reform. Not to mention one that has to date worked out pretty well.