FA Cup
annual knockout football competition
The Football Association Challenge Cup, more commonly known as the FA Cup, is an annual knockout football competition in domestic English football. First played during the 1871–72 season, it is the oldest national football competition in the world. It is organised by and named after the Football Association (the FA). A concurrent Women's FA Cup has been held since 1970.
The competition is open to all eligible clubs down to level 9 of the English football league system, with level 10 clubs acting as stand-ins in the event of non-entries from above. A record 763 clubs competed in 2011–12. The tournament consists of 12 randomly drawn rounds followed by the semi-finals and the final. Entrants are not seeded, although a system of byes based on league level ensures higher ranked teams enter in later rounds – the minimum number of games needed to win, depending on which round a team enters the competition, ranges from six to fourteen.
The first six rounds are the Qualifying Competition, and are contested by clubs in the National League System, levels 5 to 10 of the English football system, more commonly called non-League. 32 of these teams progress to the first round of the Competition Proper, meeting the first of the 48 professional teams from Leagues One and Two.
“FA Cup” enters the record as annual knockout football competition. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what annual, knockout and football can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“FA Cup” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, annual, knockout and football provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q11151. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1871, 1970 and 2011.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “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.