Everyone love an upset. Well, everyone but the fans of the team that was supposed to win. But generally speaking, in sports, David over Goliath is as time tested as any sports narrative there is, with all due respect to Rags to Riches and Overcoming Adversity. Which makes this year’s FA cup already one of the most compelling sports stories of the year, even though they’re only in the third round with three more to go. If you don’t know about the FA Cup, and I’d be surprised if you do, it’s the world’s oldest soccer tournament, where English clubs play a single elimination tournament over six qualifying and six proper rounds, bringing over 700 clubs together to name one British Champion. And what makes this tournament so interesting, beyond pretty much everything, is that it’s open to everyone. Teams from local semi-pro operations to multi-billion dollar valued Premier League Teams, like Arsenal and Chelsea. And Crystal Palace, the Premier League team who entered the third round as the defending champion. There’s a lot of nuance and strangeness in how this thing operates, like how the top tier teams enter in the third round or the random draw that creates matchups. But what matters most is that Crystal Palace, who are currently 13th in Premier League standings, played Macclesfield FC, a club currently in 14th place in the National League North, a sixth tier English league. That technically puts them 117 spots below Crystal Palace, the defending champions, in a 3rd round game that should have been at worst a blowout.
Obviously, if you didn’t know already, you see where this is going. Macclesfield won 2-1, which statistically speaking is the biggest upset in the long, long history of the FA Cup. It would be like a high school garage band winning a battle of the bands contest with Van Halen. To give some reference, their stadium only holds around 5300. I say holds, because there’s only 2000 seats. And this team is actually a reboot of the former Macclesfield club that completely went under in 2020 because it had over a half a million pounds of debt. The team’s entire payroll is under $2 million, and the highest paid player gets around 150. Almost every one of the players for Crystal Palace makes more than Macclesfield’s entire payroll. They drive cars that cost more than their opponents houses. I could go on with the cliches, but in the pantheon of David over Goliath, this one is fairly biblical.
There’s obvious reasons why big upsets are so rare, and in some cases impossible. For example, there aren’t a lot of huge upsets in track. Generally speaking, much faster runners run much faster, almost all the time. Football is pretty similar. A college team can’t beat an NFL squad, ever. And would probably have considerable medical bills in the aftermath. That’s why you don’t see Lehigh scrimmage the Eagles. Huge upsets – not improbably ones, but those nearly statistically impossible – require a confluence of luck, opportunity, and humanity. A sport where teams from different stratus get to play and something like a crossbar or a tight rim can somehow change the most unlikely of destinies. That’s what happened in the FA Cup. A sleepy Crystal Palace ran into a really, really lucky Macclesfield, and fate took its course.
To be clear, whomever Macclesfield plays next, they’re going to lose. I can’t say that with any degree of certainty, but I’m pretty confident. But the fact that no matter what I think, they’re a chance, however tiny, that I might be wrong, that’s the secret sauce of sports. That somehow, lightning might strike twice in the exact same spot. And perhaps that gives us just a little hope in our own lives. That even though life seems predestined, maybe, just maybe we might win. Might get that job we dreamed about. Might just marry the girl of our dreams. It’s why we play the lottery, right? Not that we think that we’re going to win. But at least in the moment, we can say with certainty that we won’t.
That is why we love Macclesfield FC, especially when they beat Crystal Palace, a team that admittedly we’d much rather watch – at least according to attendance and ratings. But, remember, we always love upsets.
Keith Strudler is the Dean of the College of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. You can follow him at @KeithStrudler.
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