I find a supporter of a traditional cup team like us with this kind of opinion to be disturbing-you sound like an accountant. Qualifying for the cl and winning domestic cups ARENT mutually exclusive ffs, Woolwich won fucking 8 of them while being in the top four for 95% of that era.The reality is Woolwich would happily burn those Fa cups piss on them and throw them out the window if they could replace them with a couple of years in the CL.
The FA cup wins done nothing for them in terms if moving them forward, they have done the square root of fuck all in the competitions they really value ie the CL and PL.
The Fa cup winners win 3.6 million prize money, for participating in the CL group stages each team gets 2.5 million per game just for turning up, if you lose all six games you get 15 million if you draw a game you get an additional 900k and 2.7 mil for the win, every additional stage of the CL is worth 9-15 million per round.
The reality is you are guaranteed to more than quadruple the prize money of an fa Cup win just for being in the group stages if you win every game in the groups it's nearly 9 times more which in turn guaranteed 9.5 million prize money in the last 16 taking your total to 11 times more, based on today's prize money the average annual Woolwich capitulation in the CL would net them about 35 million ! Spurs by my calculations would have made 70 million last year in prize money, so about 10 times and 20 times more prize money than an fa Cup win respectively.
I also wish winning an FA Cup ranked way above finishing 4th every year but the reality is in a world where clubs need to pay top players at least 10 million a year then the pragmatist is always going to prevail over the purist and play his strongest hand chasing the pot of gold in the CL, the FA cup is dead and will do little for a club in terms of the bigger picture and that's not even accounting for increased sponsorship and gates from the CL.
City chelsea united and liverpool have won literally dozens of domestic trophies between them in the 20 years we have won two league cups-now look what else they've all won ffs.
Winning is a mentality and it breeds the mindset for winning other trophies, fuck the prize money its a trophy we are and should have been capable of winning more than once in 25 years while everyone else has passed us by.
I'd kill to have won 8 fa cups in the last 20 years and if we had it doesnt necessarily mean we would have been going nowhere despite the trophies-ridiculous statement.