2021–22 FA Cup
football tournament season
The 2021–22 FA Cup was the 141st season and marked the 150th anniversary of the first Football Association Challenge Cup, the oldest football tournament in the world, started in the 1871–72 season. It was sponsored by Emirates and was known as the Emirates FA Cup for sponsorship purposes.
Premier League side Leicester City were the holders, having beaten Chelsea in the 2021 final. They were eliminated by Nottingham Forest in the fourth round.
Liverpool beat the two-time defending runners-up Chelsea on penalties in the final to win their eighth FA Cup overall and first since 2006. This was the fifth FA Cup final that went to extra time, with Chelsea becoming the first team to lose three consecutive finals. As winners, Liverpool would have qualified for the 2022–23 UEFA Europa League group stage; however, as they had already qualified for the Champions League via the league standings, the spot was passed down to the 6th-placed Premier League team.
Teams
The FA Cup is a knockout competition with 124 teams taking part (excluding those eliminated in the qualifying rounds) all trying to reach the Final at Wembley in May 2022. The competitors consist of the 92 teams from the Football League system (20 teams from the Premier League and the 72 in total from the EFL Championship, EFL League One and EFL League Two) plus the 32 surviving teams out of 637 teams from the National League System (levels 5–10 of the English football league system) that started the competition in qualifying rounds.
All rounds are drawn randomly, usually either at the completion of the previous round or on the evening of the last televised game of a round being played, depending on television broadcasting rights.
“2021–22 FA Cup” enters the record as football tournament season. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what football, tournament and season can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q107490348. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2021, 1871, 2006 and 2022.
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This entry incorporates text from “2021–22 FA Cup” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.