There were no league games for the top English clubs this past weekend. Instead, all 20 Premier League clubs were involved in cup ties — elimination games in quest of the cup. Or, better, the Cup. It’s always just the Cup — the magic words of English soccer since the competition first began.

Hard on the heels of baseball’s first organized league, which got under way in 1871, came the Football Association Challenge Cup, first played in 1872.

An open competition — any team, however small or feeble, could enter, affiliation with the FA being the only requirement. It was a simple one-game, knockout competition, with a random draw that paired off the teams.

And that is the way, 135 years later, it still operates. With hundreds of amateur, semipro, and pro clubs entering, this huge competition now begins with a series of seven preliminary and elimination rounds, before the big pro clubs enter at the “third round proper” stage. Which is when there arrives the delicious prospect of a famous club with millionaire players having to leave their luxury stadium and travel to a small town to play on a tiny field against a semipro team.

Very occasionally the hopeless underdogs win, and an outrageous upset allows unfamiliar names into the record book. In 1992, highflying Arsenal of the Premier League were shot down by little Wrexham of the third division. Twenty years earlier, Newcastle United of the first division were beaten by Hereford United — a “nonleague” team, i.e. a minor-league team below the level of the 92-team structure of English pro soccer.

That is the glamour — the word is used repeatedly to boost the competition — of the FA Cup. A very English competition, largely based on something that can only be described with a German word, schadenfreude, the delight of seeing the big guys taken down a peg or two.

It’s a wonderful, heartwarming scenario, but unfortunately it has lost a lot of its glow. The modern game has little time for such romanticism, and the Cup — once considered the major trophy of the English game — is viewed less admiringly these days.

The overriding concern of top clubs is now to be a part of the money-saturated Premier League. EPL clubs Sheffield United and Charlton Athletic, for instance, are in trouble at the bottom end of the standings. To such clubs, fighting against a real threat of being relegated out of the league at the end of the season, the FA Cup is a distraction.

Both Sheffield and Charlton lost on Saturday to opposition from the Championship, the division below the EPL. Charlton were beaten 0–2 at Nottingham Forest, while Sheffield were booed off the field in their own stadium after a 0–3 loss to Swansea City.

Humiliating losses, for sure — but losses that free the clubs of cup commitments and allow them to concentrate on the more vital task of winning EPL games.

The Sheffield coach, Neil Warnock, rested four of his regular starters, summing up his attitude: “If we can stay in the Premier League, that will be the finest achievement in my whole life — and that’s far more important, I’m afraid, at the moment.”

Only one nonleague team had survived to take part in this weekend’s 32 cup ties — Tamworth United, a team from the Midlands that plays in a small stadium called the Lamb Ground. It was there that they hosted Championship side Norwich City on Saturday in a nationally televised game of the sort that ought to exude the poor versus rich glamour of the Cup.

But this was a totally glamour-free occasion — a poor game in which Tamworth were outclassed and lost 1–4. Around midnight, things got even worse for Tamworth when armed robbers burst into its clubhouse and made off with a large part of the ticket proceeds from the game.

A further example of the harsh realism that tends to overwhelm the romanticism of the cup legend was on view during Chelsea’s home game against Macclesfield Town. Chelsea is currently placed second in the EPL. Macclesfield Town is uncomfortably placed next to the bottom in the League Division 2, meaning they are precisely 89 places below Chelsea in the English league structure.

But Chelsea showed no mercy to its outmatched opponents, crushing them 6–1 with insulting ease. Unlike Sheffield and Charlton, Chelsea has no relegation fears and has much less reason to fear the extra games that come with progress in the cup competition.

Chelsea’s strong position is all about money; it has the cash necessary to stock its bench with top players. And it is money that has corroded the romantic image of the Cup. Even at lowly Tamworth, where the club’s quick reaction to being handed a home game against Norwich on national television was to announce that the team would wear a special jersey for the game, featuring messages from three sponsors.

The scramble to make money from a home game against an EPL club has sometimes meant that the small club has given up its right to stage the game — and therefore any realistic prospect of winning it — and agreed to play at the stadium of the Premier League club. That is simply a matter of attendance. At Tamworth on Saturday, the Lamb Ground was jammed with 3,165 fans. Had the game been switched, it would have been played in Norwich’s 26,000 capacity stadium, with the potential for a much larger payday for Tamworth.

But the FA Cup will regain some of its glamour when the final is played in May. In 2003, an 80-year tradition of playing the final in Wembley Stadium was broken as the old stadium was torn down to make way for a new version. This year — after many a delay — the new stadium will at last be ready, and one of England’s greatest sporting occasions comes home from its three-year exile in Wales (at Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium).

The Wembley traditions of a lush green field, of community singing before the game, of the queen in attendance, plus the less certain blessing of sparkling spring sunshine will be reborn. But of course, this is not for the lesser clubs. It will be two EPL teams fighting it out on the field on May 19.

pgardner@nysun.com