This is a re-write of one of the most popular and regularly recurring questions brought up on social media and elsewhere regarding independence:
“Would Welsh clubs playing in the English pyramid (Cardiff City etc.) be forced into the Welsh football pyramid?”
The biggest impact has arguably been felt in the FAW Cup and European club competitions.
From the 1995-96 season onwards, Welsh clubs playing in the English pyramid were barred from competing in the Welsh Cup. Until that point, winning the Welsh Cup enabled clubs playing in the English pyramid to qualify for the UEFA Cup Winners’ Cup (now the Europa League & Conference League).
This meant Swansea City, Cardiff City, Wrexham and Newport County have all competed as Welsh club representatives in Europe. Since the ban, if any of them quality for Europe – as Swansea City did in 2013-14 by winning the English League Cup – it’s as an English club representative and counts towards the English club coefficient.
Resultingly, the coefficient used to calculate the number of Welsh clubs that can enter UEFA competitions (and at what round) has slumped to embarrassing levels.
Semi-professional Welsh clubs who qualify through the Cymru Premier and Welsh Cup often exit in early qualifying rounds to teams from northern and eastern Europe that might be fully professional or halfway through their seasons due to summer calendars.
While the days of double-figure thumpings in European qualifying rounds are almost over, Wales is currently placed lower in the UEFA coefficient than Luxembourg, the Faroe Islands, Malta, Estonia, Iceland and only a few points ahead of Gibraltar (who only joined UEFA in 2013).
For the sake of argument, if the exiled clubs were still able to play in the Welsh Cup (and won it consistently), the likes of Swansea and Cardiff ought to be able to reach the knockout stages of the Conference League or Europa League, while Newport and Wrexham would go fairly far into the qualifying rounds and possibly even reach the group stages – much further than any Cymru Premier side simply because of the resources at their disposal.
As for the Welsh Cup itself, finals that used to get five-figure crowds are now lucky to get more than 1,500 through the gates.
The average attendance at a Cymru Premier game is between 300-400, compared to the 4,000-18,000 who regularly attend league games for Cardiff, Swansea, Wrexham and Newport.
The standard of football in the Cymru Premier has noticeably improved alongside investment in coaching by the FAW; the bigger clubs would likely hold their own in the English National League.
Nonetheless, the lack of historic financial and infrastructure support for the Welsh pyramid and the absence of professional teams from the largest towns and cities has led to:
- Some of the biggest Welsh pyramid clubs going out of business and having to be refounded due to a mix of financial problems and mismanagement by poor owners (Bangor City, Rhyl, Barry Town).
- The domestic pyramid sometimes being an afterthought of the FAW (a recent row over a rescheduled league cup final being a case in point).
- Under-investment in facilities.
- Clubs routinely failing to meet (often quite basic) licensing requirements.
- A lack of serious political and media interest (S4C and social media aside).
Football in Wales does, of course, face a unique challenge in Europe of not being the out-and-out most popular sport – perhaps only shared by Ireland (Gaelic games), Iceland (handball) and the Baltic countries (ice hockey and basketball).
