In 2009, Cardiff City moved into their new home, Cardiff City stadium. One reminder of their former home is pictured above, the gates of Ninian Park, home for Cardiff City from 1910 until the ground’s demolition in 2009. We looked at Ninian Park’s demolition in pictures a couple of years ago.

Ninian Park’s historic gates were saved and installed at the new stadium. Apparently, one of the bluebirds on the gates had been stolen during Ninian Park’s final days, but a replica was made from the remaining bluebird.

Photo credit: Phil Tilter on Flickr

This is the west end of Welsh club Rhyl FC’s Belle Vue stadium, with the photo taken at half-time during a September 2011 game against Llangefni Town in Cymru Alliance. Now all-seater, the stadium has been adapted to accommodate European football – Rhyl FC played in the UEFA Champions League in both 2004-05 and 2009-10. The official attendance was 406.

Photo credit: Feversham Lens on Flickr

While to fans of MLS it may seem normal for a league to span two countries, the existence of Swansea in the Premier League, Cardiff City in the Football League and Newport County, Wrexham, Merthyr Town and Colwyn Bay further down in the English system remains a subject of some controversy to UEFA and within Welsh and English football. A potted history of Welsh football is in order to explain this anomaly.

The Welsh national association is one of the oldest in the world, founded in 1876, 13 years after the English FA and three years after the Scottish FA. Its original hotspot was in North Wales, mainly around Wrexham, where the sport had crossed the border from Cheshire in England. In south Wales though, rather than Association Football taking hold, it was Rugby Football that became the most popular organised game in the country in the late nineteenth century.

This distinction can be seen in the contrast between the country’s biggest professional clubs – Wrexham in the north date back to 1872, while in the south of the country Cardiff were founded in 1899 and Swansea in 1913. This delayed national development provided an immediate impediment to a strong Welsh league developing in the crucial early decades of organised football in Great Britain, and was unlike the story in Scotland, to contrast to another English neighbour. Challenging issues of north-south transit in Wales also proved to be a challenge to national play in the country.

Welsh participation in the English league system thus dates back to the country’s oldest club, Wrexham. Located close to the border with England adjacent to the Northwest hub of English football, it actually proved to be more profitable for the club to play in the English Combination minor league that ran from 1890 to 1911 than in the nascent Welsh League, with the inferior competition in Wales dettering spectators and players alike (Wrexham briefly played in the Welsh league from 1894-1896, easily winning it both seasons they participated in). Wrexham eventually rose up the English system to the Football League, and the newer professional Welsh clubs such as Swansea and Cardiff followed them across the border in the early twentieth century.

Cardiff had the strongest run of success in English competition in the twentieth century, winning the FA Cup in 1927, three years after finishing as runners-up in the Football League’s top division. Swansea themselves rose to the top flight in 1981 after three successive promotions from the basement division under John Toshack. They finished in sixth place in the 1981-82 season, but just as quickly fell back to the bottom tier by 1986.

Meantime, the Welsh teams playing in the English league system were still allowed to compete in the Welsh Cup, of course dominating it. This provided Welsh clubs with a route to European competition. This issue has proven to be controversial: in the early 1990s, a national Welsh Premier League was established, featuring both professional and semi-pro clubs, with all Welsh clubs invited to join it. The professional clubs from four of Wales’ biggest conurbations – Cardiff, Swansea, Newport and Wrexham – all refused to join, remaining in the English system. Clubs playing in the English league system were thus banned from participating in the Welsh Cup in 1995, removing that route to European competition for clubs such as Swansea and Cardiff – though that may be about to change.

The Welsh Premier League even had considerable trouble attracting the smaller Welsh teams, issuing sanctions that forced clubs such as Merthyr Tydfil (now Merthyr Town) to take court action to be able to play their home games in the English system within Welsh borders. The Welsh Premier League struggles due to the absence of clubs such as Swansea, though it does allow for some glorious moments for some very small clubs in European competition – the champions of the league qualify for the UEFA Champions League, with Barry Town beating an admittedly weakened FC Porto team 3-1 at Jenner Park in Wales in 2001 (they still lost 9-3 on aggregate, though!).

All that said, Swansea City’s promotion to the Premier League is a fantastic achievement, and brings a touch of Welsh exotica to the league – along with a welcome commitment to continue playing attractive soccer from their manager Brendan Rodgers.

While the eyes of the English media have been firmly planted on Portsmouth’s collapse, and to a much less extent on Chester City (see yesterday’s post), a small Welsh club that has been around in one form or another since as far back as 1876 is facing its own battle for sheer survival.

Caernarfon Town FC have been suspended from the Huws Gray Cymru Alliance in Wales, and are facing extinction.

The only place reporting on this is the North Wales Daily Post, who tell us that:

A question mark now hangs over the entire future of Caernarfon Town Football Club, which was relegated from the Welsh Premier League last year, and is now mired in a similar battle for survival in the Huws Gray Cymru Alliance.

The club failed to pay the undisclosed fine amount by 3pm yesterday, a deadline set by the FAW.

This means today’s scheduled match against Llanfairpwll, on Anglesey will not now go ahead, leaving the club, which is currently languishing third from bottom, facing a likely three point deduction.

Up until Friday afternoon, club secretary Geraint Jones and the FAW in Cardiff were confident the fine would be paid but the deadline passed, and now manager Simon Sedgewick believes it is inevitable the club will fold.

Mr Sedgewick has confirmed to the Daily Post that he has already told his players they are now free to find other clubs.

A source close to the club told the Daily Post that players have not been paid for some weeks, adding that the short term future was “not looking good”.

Mr Sedgewick said: “I sent a text to the players to say they were free to find other clubs.

“It’s such as shame because Caernarfon is the biggest club in the Cymru Alliance and it’s ironic this has happened on the day that Portsmouth has gone into administration and Chester City have been thrown out of their league.

It seems that club Chairman George Denham has a lot of questions to answer; he could not be contacted by the Daily Post, and rather more alarmingly, has not spoken to manager Simone Sedgewick for over three weeks. Players haven’t been paid for over a month.

The sum of money Caernarfon owe is reportedly quite small, with Sedgewick suggesting it could have been found if  “only the chairman had sat down with the management and the players I am sure we could have worked something out,” and likening the club to “a passenger ship with no captain.”

We’ll follow-up and see what happens to Caernarfon, but it looks like it could be a long road back for the club.

Big Story
One shock result and all is well once again with the FA Cup, according to Sam Wallace in the Independent, who says “Here’s a radical theory: the FA Cup is actually in relatively decent shape.” Wallace’s argument is mainly that it’s a myth that the FA Cup used to be less predictable in the first place:

Despite all their other priorities, attitudes towards the FA Cup among clubs and fans are healthy particularly in light of the fact that winning it has always been the preserve of the big teams, give or take the occasional anomaly. These days it is ever more restricted to the big four – who have won 16 FA Cups out of the last 18 – but it was not that much more egalitarian in football’s golden age.

In the 1960s, when football was much less divided by wealth, the FA Cup was won by teams finishing in the top eight for six out of the 10 years between 1960 and 1969. The lowest ranked club to win it in that decade were Manchester United, who finished 19th when they won the Cup in 1963. They won the league title two years later with much the same team.

This is an incomplete argument. Since the advent of the Premier League in 1992, only six different teams have won the trophy. In the two decades prior to that, 13 different teams won the trophy. Even in the decade that Wallace cherrypicks as his example, the 1960s, eight different teams were victorious.

What Wallace’s numbers show is that the FA Cup is a reflection of English football as a whole, and English football as a whole has become much more predictable because of the dominance of the same big clubs — ie, the variety of the clubs finishing in the top eight Wallace mentions has been reduced substantially. In the post-war period up until the start of the Premier League, many, many different teams finished at or within touching distance of the top of the league. “Big” teams did not dominate for as long (exceptions such as Liverpool aside, but for some reason their dominance elsewhere was not reflected in the FA Cup), so different teams more often won trophies, especially the FA Cup for those just outside the title race itself.

What has changed is not that the the top eight or so best clubs are winning the trophy more often (the best clubs usually will), it’s that the top of English football itself has become much more predictable, and the top few within that elite ever more dominant over the past two decades. This is reflected in the big four’s dominance of the FA Cup, and the reaction to the Leeds result yesterday only shows how much many would want that to change.

Worldwide News

• Fans of Cardiff City are dismayed that a season ticket drive for next season they believed was planned to fund investment in the team during the January transfer window will instead go to pay an outstanding tax bill, as the Sunday newspapers revealed.  The Cardiff City Supporters’ Trust released a statement today expressing their concern that this is the latest in an ongoing series of episodes of financial mismanagement and the truth being hidden from fans. The club have responded by saying that “Cardiff City Football Club are concerned at an article in one of today’s national newspapers. Some of the information contained within this article can only have come from documents which have been stolen from officials at the Club and are currently the subject of a police investigation.”
• Meanwhile, the Manchester United Supporters’ Trust (MUST) has also released a statement about a Sunday newspaper report that the Glazers are unsuccessfully trying to refinance their debt. MUST asks: “The Glazers have taken us from being a club that were the richest in the sporting world to now the most indebted. In the four years before the Glazers’ takeover the Manchester United invested over £80 million in the form of players like Rooney and Ronaldo. In the four years since the Glazer takeover the turnover has doubled but, despite protestations to the contrary, independently published figures suggest the net transfer spend is now negative. We have to be thankful for the magnificent job the manager and his squad have done. Where would we be now without the success Sir Alex has managed to maintain on the pitch?”
• There is a curious piece in the Guardian on South Africa and the World Cup, as low key New Year’s celebrations are suggested as a warning the World Cup itself could be lacklustre. The correlation between the two seems pretty shaky to me.

The Sweeper appears every weekday, and once at the weekend. For more rambling and links throughout the day every day, follow your editor Tom Dunmore @pitchinvasion on Twitter.

The former home of Cardiff City, Ninian Park, demolished this year.

Photo credit: Simon J Jones on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.

Behind the North Bank of Vetch Field, home of Swansea City in Wales until 2005.

Photo credit: edmwnd on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.

Photo credits: joncandy on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.