FanHouse

The oldest football competition in the world is holding its final at Wembley Stadium on Saturday. I'm hard-pressed to find anyone who cares.

The whole of England is focused on the Champions League Final on Wednesday. And why not? It's the first all-English final in history, and it features the two clubs who finished 1st and 2nd in the Premier League. All the press is focused on who might play, who might not play, who's jealous of whom, who might be changing clubs in the summer, whether Moscow can pull it off and if the late local start time will impact players. Even ESPN is advertising this Manchester United v. Chelsea match during NBA Playoff games.

Last year, Manchester United and Chelsea were in the FA Cup Final, and everyone was buzzing about it. This year, we get two cinderella stories -- Portsmouth and Cardiff City -- and the buzz is non-existent. It's all about the Champions League Final. Why is that?

Well, for starters, it's Portsmouth and Cardiff. These aren't exactly superclubs with big international followings. Sure, Portsmouth has been in the top half of the Premier League table nearly all season, but it's still a small club on the south coast of England that only got to the Premier League in 2003 and spent three years staving off relegation before gaining any sort of respectability. Plus, it's 19th in the Premier League in average attendance (19,914), even though Fratton Park was more than 96% filled to capacity each week.

Cardiff City, meanwhile, is down in the Coca-Cola Championship, so nobody outside of the UK has any idea who they are, unless they're Welsh expatriates who grew up supporting the club. The only other people who know Cardiff exists are fans of the new Doctor Who.

Yet both these clubs have vanquished all comers to get here. Portsmouth even beat Manchester United to reach this final. In response, they get a whole bunch of soccer fans turning away from Wembley and looking to Moscow. Even the Championship promotion playoff final between Bristol City and Hull City next weekend seems bigger than this FA Cup Final.

Perhaps that gets to the heart of modern European soccer. Fans don't want Cinderella stories -- not the neutral fans, anyway. They wants big money and high glamour. They want the Big Four and a few other contenders, and the rest can go do whatever. If it were Man United playing Cardiff here, people might care, because there's at least a giant up for slaying. That's what made the Carling Cup Final between Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur so intriguing. It featured a big London club getting beaten by a local rival with aspirations of being just as internationally renown.

Portsmouth v. Cardiff carries none of that drama. These two clubs have already pulled off their big FA Cup upsets. There's no rivalry between them, and even the idea of Cardiff in the UEFA Cup has no allure for most neutral fans. Plus, there's nobody to hate here. Most fans look at these clubs and say, "Oh, well, good for them. Shall we go to the flea market tomorrow?"

That's why talk of a European Super League will never die down. Soccer fans around the world want the best of the best facing each other week after week, and any other competition only has meaning when big clubs decide to give it meaning. If England's Big Four continue to throw reserves on the pitch for FA Cup matches so they can focus on the Champions League, how much future does this grand old FA Cup really have?