The unique and inspirational stories behind the FA Cup first qualifying round
Almost 300 teams will be looking to make it past Sunday's first round of qualifiers, and many have incredible backstories behind their cup run dreams...
This weekend, the road to Wembley starts for hundreds of clubs who have decided to enter the Adobe Women’s FA Cup this season.
288 teams will play across the country on Sunday in the first qualifying round of the tournament, none with any realistic chance of making May’s showpiece occasion, but all with the same dream, and all able to say they played in one of the sport’s most historic competitions.
Last year, there were scorelines ranging from 8-6 to 21-1 to 32-0, and while many teams don’t enter year on year, that offers the opportunity for new faces, and there are many embarking on their first ever FA Cup journey this season.
While a browse down the draw list will show more established names such as Sheffield Wednesday, there are some stories that really standout, with unique backgrounds and which paint a picture of what this competition is all about.
“When we got the email saying we could have a go at it…” says Emily Wallis, President of FXSU, the Student Union of Falmouth & Exeter University in Cornwall.
Yes, there is a Student Union team in the first qualifying around, along with an academy of girls set up by a former Football League playe and a Royal Navy air station base, just a few among many other incredible and quirky stories.
“I’d been speaking to the previous President like ‘shall we just go for it?!’” continues Wallis, who will also be playing for the team on Sunday. “It might be a bit hard to get players together, but it’s the FA Cup at the end of the day!
“This is the first time I’ve ever been part of a team that’s been in the FA Cup, so it’s very brand new to me! I just received an email from our league secretary saying we could apply if we wanted to. Like you say, it’s the FA Cup, it’s something we can say we’ve done, so we thought ‘why not?’ At least we’ve tried.”
428 miles north, the GT7 Academy will also be hoping to create history on its first foray into the competition, when they face Darlington away in the opening round of qualifiers.
The name comes from the two former players who set it up six years ago, Shaun Gardner and Garry Thompson, and they’ve made their women’s team a priority, and while it’s a young side, they too are living the dream this weekend.
“Garry was coming to the end of his career, he was down at Wycombe and Notts Country, but he’d spent 10 years at Morecambe and then came back to Morecambe,” says Gardner, who is on camp in France with one of his teams, but will be heading back to England in time for Sunday’s big game.
“Through a mutual friend we knew of each other, but with Garry down south we didn’t know each other too formally. I was going into schools doing coaching and a friend said Garry should speak to me, so we met up and everything I thought football should be about, Garry was on the same page.
“Environment-led, essentially. I was at Sheffield United, Blackburn Rovers and Carlisle United when I was younger. He was at Sheffield Wednesday, then Preston.
“We both got stopped from playing with our school teams so we really wanted to focus on grassroots where kids could get UEFA standard coaching but still play with their friends.”
Check out more in-depth unique stories in WFC’s Premium section, available for just £45 for 12 months, paid in one go, or a £6 a month rolling subscription.
All subscriptions come with a 7-day free trial to allow you to explore our full archive.
Plus, guarantee you everything that is to come over the next 12 months…
Or check out some other Relevant Reads…
At their first open day in 2018, 34 kids turned up, and they had to cancel their first game just four years ago because they only had nine players available.
Now they have over 500 boys and girls at their Kendal base, and have just created a reserve team on the women’s side of the academy, with a pathway all the way from under 7s level to under 16s.
“The ladies is our flagship,” Gardner continues. “We don’t have a senior men’s team, we have a pathway for the girls. On Sunday, there’s a girl who has just turned 16 who will play and her mum played four years ago and set up the team herself. There’s a lot of poetic stories to it.
“Me and Garry take a financial hit, but we don’t see it that way. We support and back the manager, we help out where we can, it’s great to see the girls from where we started. It took us until near the end of the season to even get our first goal. This year is the first year we have a number of girls and the pathway is in full flow, so the future looks bright and we’re excited to be in the FA Cup.”
Like FXSU, this is the first time GT7 is entering the competition, but they’ve risen through the leagues after earning promotion and then being pushed up a further level during a restructure of the lower leagues, meaning they’ve come up against the likes of Wigan Athletic and Blackburn Rovers in the past few years, and now participate in the North West Counties Championship.
“It’s coming on in our area, there’s five teams now within about 10-15 minutes. When we started six years ago, there was one.
“We’re between Penrith and Lancaster. Morecambe take players from the Kendal region but get players from the Manchester clubs. Penrith cover everything out west and we’re kind of in the middle. It’s brilliant, because there are players who played previously who had stopped and have come back to play for us.”
Back down in the South West, Andrew Plenty is preparing for another big day with RNAS Culdrose, a Royal Navy air station team also based in Cornwall, who unlike their local counterparts are entering the competition for the third time.
Plenty has done everything from reserve team manager, first team manager, assistant of the women’s team, as well as secretary and treasurer across his 31 years with the club, and is currently waiting for a bar delivery ahead of Sunday’s home game against Saltash Borough.
“Our women’s team was formed in 2014,” Plenty says. “We’re part of the Royal Navy air station down in Cornwall, so the club is the largest UK armed forces sports clubs, but we never really had a female pathway.
“We started the journey with the women and one youth team, now we have a full pathway from under 8s to under 18s.”
He admits they have had a “few quirks” over the years, one in particular which has led to them coining the nickname “The Phoenix’s”.
“With the nature of the navy we lost all our best players. At the start of one season we had five or six players, so we created a mum’s club and they kept the team going, hence the nickname Phoenix’s.
“Although we completed the season, we did make the headlines for the wrong reasons. The Mirror ran a story about us losing to our main rivals at Helston down the road [the game finished 40-0], but by the end of the season we had more competitive games.
“If you roll on a few years, we won the league, a few girls came back from deployment. We won the Cornwall Division Two in 2022, then were runners-up straight away in Division One in 2023, so it was a great run and a bit of a step change from when we were teaching mum’s about set-pieces.”
Plenty originally joined RNAS Culdrose as a player at 19 when he first joined the naval air station, so it’s another momentous day for him in particular, as it is everyone involved in the competition, whether it be for the first time or not.
“My wife played as well. She was a youth coach with the under 16s last season and got nominated for female coach of the year by the Cornwall FA, which was lovely. She’s taken those girls from under 8s and a few of those have stepped up and will be playing in the FA Cup on Sunday.”
Down the road in Falmouth, there is an equal buzz, even if Wallis admits she is “nervous” for the big occasion, but is proud of how far the team has come, especially given the social aspect of being a Student Union team too.
“The league secretary said not that many teams from Cornwall apply, so we thought it would be a nice way to gain some more recognition. We had a few American players last season, we have people come from all over the country.”
Wallis, now a second-year student who first started playing age eight in her home in Cambridgeshire, admits it will be nice to “gain some recognition”, but despite a regional draw have a three-hour journey to face Stoke Gabriel and Torbay Police, based on the northern coast of Cornwall near Totnes.
All the teams have their challenges, and being a university team with players from elsewhere, FXSU’s are stronger than most given this is their first game of the season, with their local regional league yet to start.
“Our season starts late, so it’s hard to get people in for pre-season. People go home, everyone’s all over the country, so preparing is quite difficult.
“But I’ve played since I was a kid, so this is not something I thought I’d ever do, but here we are! The girls are really excited for this, hopefully it lives up to expectations.”
She hopes it will give everyone a “boost” off the back of the team earning promotion last season, as well as potentially attracting more local girls to the university, with the team playing its games in the South West Division of The Earthbound Electrical Cornwall Women's Football League.
“I’m really proud, actually. I hope it does attract more girls, hopefully it puts us on the map a little bit. My dad said something very similar, actually, the team is mainly students from all over, but we’re more than happy to take local girls.”
For some though, the realities bite hard.
The i21 international academy, primarily made up of American students, has had to withdraw from the competition due to the dates of being able to register their players returning from the USA for the new season.
Head of Coaching, Bryan Hughes, another ex-pro for the likes of Hull City and Birmingham City , explains by email the troubles the team have hit which has led to them pulling out of their match against Washington.
Because their players are students, the academic year technically starts on Sunday 1st September, the day of the first qualifying round, and combined with the extra time it takes for American players to go through the clearance process, i21 have been unable to field a team.
“When we made the decision to enter into the FA Cup this season, it was done so having made the assumption that given the previous season's start dates we would have more than enough time to secure International Clearance and our students would be back;
2022 - 2023 - Sunday September 11th
2023 - 2024 - Sunday September 10th
“The earlier start dates this season has caught us out, and we have been working tirelessly to try and find appropriate solutions and outcomes, but unfortunately we have had to inform the FA we will have to withdraw from the competition.
“We were desperate to play in the competition, and asked the FA if the tie could be played during the midweek as we were confident of having the squad back. Unfortunately for us they couldn’t do that as the competition needs to be started on the 1st September.”
For others, there are their own rules to play by, such as at RNAS Culdrose, where joint service rules state 51% of the players must be made up of people who are MOD.
“We do have local civilians,” explains Plenty. “Particularly in the youth teams from the local community, that helps massively with community engagement.
“The senior teams are considered the unit sides, but the majority are all service personnel. It brings them together because we’re a bit out on a limb in the west of Cornwall, but being the Royal Navy we have players from all around the country and they are friends and colleagues away from the pitch too.”
At the GT7, the main issue is the turnover of players, but it’s also something their immensely proud of, knowing they serve a purpose to develop young people in the Kendal area for the move into senior football.
Gardner, whose cousin Abby Holmes played in an FA Cup final for Sunderland, is delighted to have seen some of their girls move onto clubs like Manchester United.
“We do lose players,” he admits. “We have a couple at Manchester United and Liverpool, but that’s all positive. The idea is to develop them up. Selfishly, we hope they play for GT7 Ladies, but Iris Thwaites has gone to United and Martha Allington is playing a year up for both United and England at the moment.”
The crucial thing though is sustainability.
While it only costs less than £100 to enter a team into the FA Cup, making it sustainable throughout a whole season is a challenge.
For the three teams in question, they all have things to help them along their way. FXSU gets grants from the university, while GT7 is primarily funded by Gardner and Thompson, while RNAS Culdrose also get support from both the County FA and the Navy FA.
With the increase in prize money in recent years, the reward for just getting past Sunday’s first qualifying round is £1,800, perhaps small change to the teams who will go on and compete at Wembley next summer, but an amount which will be huge to any of the teams progressing this weekend.
“That would look very nice in our union bank account,” chuckles Wallis. “There are quite a few grants we can apply for to help out with paying for pitches, kits etc, they’ve been a big help.”
Gardner adds, “The money goes straight back into the girls and the setup. Training gear, footballs, hiring a pitch. There’s only one 3G pitch [in the area] and it’s a battle to get, the cost is at a premium.
“The main thing I suppose is we’re just very proud to be in it and if we could get a win…it’s a big, historic club in Darlington, that’s a buzz in itself. We trained last night, it was a good, fun atmosphere, that whole FA Cup feeling. Hopefully we could get a win and regardless we’ll enjoy the experience.”
RNAS Culdrose have set their memberships at lower prices, enough as Plenty explains to cover things such as match official fees, in order to get more people signed up, but he too admits the money from a win on Sunday would be “massive”.
“We self-finance. We get regulated to make sure we’re viable, but we have to raise our own funds, so £1,800 would support the women’s team a huge amount of and be hugely important.
“We’ve played in it twice before and both times lost, this time we’re at home and playing against a team in our league we’ve played before, so we hope there’s a chance.”