Cup Eligibility
Being members of a league at a particular level also affects eligibility for Cup, or single-elimination, competitions.
- FA Cup: Levels 1 to 10 (and very occasionally 11)
- Football League Cup: Levels 1 to 4
- Football League Trophy: Levels 3 to 4 (and some seasons, Level 5)
- Conference League Cup: Levels 5 to 6
- FA Trophy: Levels 5 to 8
- FA Vase: Levels 9 to 11
- FA Inter-League Cup: Level 11 (contested by representative teams from each league)
Below Level 11 the pyramid becomes regional and the cups become accordingly regional. Further down the pyramid is split on a county basis, counties having their own cups accordingly. This excludes some tournaments marked "Senior Cups", which often are competitions between teams representing top professional clubs in a given district, and may be little more than derbies, such as the Gloucestershire Cup, which originally included all teams in Gloucestershire but is now contested as a Bristol derby.
Read more about this topic: English Football League System
Famous quotes containing the word cup:
“Sisters define their rivalry in terms of competition for the gold cup of parental love. It is never perceived as a cup which runneth over, rather a finite vessel from which the more one sister drinks, the less is left for the others.”
—Elizabeth Fishel (20th century)