Amajita into U20 Afcon final after close-fought win over Nigeria
South Africa are through to the final of the U20 Afcon tournament in Egypt after they beat Nigeria 1-0 in their semi-final clash on Thursday evening.
In a closely fought contest, it was a goal from Tylon Smith in the 66th minute that secured the win for Amajita.
And so it ends ....... We are off to the final!!!! pic.twitter.com/TbV4BFEKtL
— SAFA.net (@SAFA_net) May 15, 2025
Smith headed home from an acute angle on the right-hand post following a cross from deep.
South Africa, who by reaching the semi-finals qualified for the 2025 U20 World Cup, will face either Egypt or Morocco in the final, which will take place on Sunday, 18 May at 20:00 (SA time).
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New York Times
an hour ago
- New York Times
Manchester United fans' survey results: Concerns about INEOS but players to blame for terrible season
We asked, and you answered. The Athletic would like to thank all of its subscribers who took part in our Manchester United end-of-season survey. Thousands of you contributed, creating an interesting temperature check on one of the world's most significant — and newsworthy — football clubs. After United's worst season of the Premier League era, we wanted to know how fans are feeling about life in and around Old Trafford. Here are the results… Talk of the Devils listeners may be familiar with 'The Andy Mitten Standard of Quality', whereby a good United season requires a top-four league finish and a piece of silverware. Erik ten Hag was the last manager to achieve the seal of approval, finishing third in the 2022-23 season and winning the League Cup. Advertisement The majority of United subscribers believe the minimum for a successful 2025-26 would be Ruben Amorim's team qualifying for the Europa League — a position best secured with a sixth-place league finish, but which can be achieved through winning a domestic trophy. Thirty-six per cent of survey takers would like Amorim's men to do one better, saying that Champions League qualification counts as the minimum level of success. United finished 15th in the Premier League last season, 24 points off Newcastle United in fifth, the lowest Champions League spot. Amorim will be heartened to learn that The Athletic subscribers believe he might one day bring the Premier League title back to Old Trafford. Thirty-eight per cent of survey entrants have faith that the head coach may one day deliver the club's 21st title, while nearly 31.6 per cent believe him capable of turning the team into Champions League competitors. And 11.5 per cent of you believe Amorim's talent ceiling stops at Europa League competition, while 11.1 per cent of subscribers believe he might one day win a cup competition. 'Six months ago, after my first three games in charge with two victories and one draw, I said to you: 'The storm is coming'. Today, after this disastrous season, I want to tell you the good days are coming,' said Amorim following the final Premier League game of 2024-25. 'If there is one club in the world that has proven in the past that it can overcome any situation, any disaster, it is our club… It is Manchester United Football Club.' Apologies to Tyrell Malacia, who enjoyed a successful six-month loan at Dutch side PSV, but The Athletic wanted to know if United fans saw a future in three of their headline loanees from 2024-25. The answer was a resounding no: 64 per cent of respondents would prefer it if Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Antony pursued futures away from Old Trafford. Rashford is pursuing a move to Barcelona this summer. Following some impressive performances for Real Betis, Antony prefers to continue his career in La Liga. Only three per cent of respondents wanted Sancho to continue his United career. The 25-year-old will be returning to the club — however briefly — after an agreement could not be reached over personal terms with Chelsea to make his loan move permanent. The most straightforward question of our survey got our most straightforward answer: Bruno Fernandes was voted as United's most important player in our survey. The 30-year-old was awarded a litany of individual accolades for his performances this season. Fernandes won four consecutive Player of the Month awards between February and May in 2024-25 for United. He also won United's Player of the Year and Players' Player of the Year (an award voted by those within the dressing room) prizes. This week, the captain explained he was happy to stay at Old Trafford, despite a lucrative offer to leave from Saudi Arabian club Al Hilal. Fernandes is the rare, consistent shining light at United. Amorim and others will look to build around him in the summer. Outgoings will be a major point of conversation for the club this summer, and 38.5 per cent of survey respondents said they were most comfortable selling Rashford. Rasmus Hojlund endured a difficult second season at Old Trafford, leading to 21.4 per cent of subscribers being open to the striker being sold. Advertisement Amorim informed his players that he intends to remain at the club for next season following defeat in the Europa League final. He also told Alejandro Garnacho to find a new club in front of those assembled — 18.1 per cent of respondents would be open to selling the 20-year-old. Rashford and Garnacho's status as academy graduates means their potential sales would be registered as 'pure profit' in club accounts. There is more to United than on-field performance, and that was made clear by our survey. INEOS's 18 months in charge of footballing operations have seen several concerns raised about the club via fan protests and other means. In our survey, 45 per cent of respondents were concerned about the redundancies made under Sir Jim Ratcliffe and his leadership group. United confirmed in February that they were set to make 150 to 200 redundancies as part of wider cost-cutting measures, following the 250 layoffs made the previous summer. It is understood that 450 members of staff have left since Ratcliffe completed his minority purchase in February 2024. Just over 19 per cent of participants expressed discomfort over INEOS's decision-making over head coaches: £21million ($28.4m) has been spent on renewing and dismissing Ten Hag, before hiring Amorim. Just over 15 per cent of you are concerned by INEOS's dealings in the transfer market. This summer will represent another opportunity for player trading, this time with Jason Wilcox operating as the club's director of football. And 14.8 per cent of you expressed 'Other' as your leading concern under INEOS. Please inform and elaborate on that topic through the comment section below, especially if the topic is ticket prices. There were split opinions over INEOS's running of the club within our survey, but the majority of answers voiced displeasure at INEOS's handling of Manchester United: 18.2 per cent of correspondents believe the minority investors to be performing at a five out of 10 level. A combined 62.9 per cent of respondents graded Ratcliffe and his executive group at a four out of 10 level or below. Advertisement A disappointing league campaign, defeat in the Europa League final will have played a role in INEOS's changed perspective in the public eye. Frustration over rising ticket prices, and the reception to the proposed new 100,000-seater stadium illustrate the difficult needle Ratcliffe and others are trying to thread. The Athletic's 2024-25 season review gave Amorim a three out of 10 grade for his 42 matches in charge. Our survey was a bit more charitable. Just over 24 per cent of respondents have the head coach a five out of 10 rating for his work from November to May. He strikes a confident and charismatic tone in press conferences and one-on-one interviews, but his adherence to a bespoke 3-4-3 tactical shape has caused frustration within some sections of the fanbase. Despite the low scoring, United fans would ideally like to give Amorim time to reshape the squad to his liking, rather than call for his immediate dismissal. Amorim himself will hope for a positive summer and start to 2025-26 to win any naysayers back onside. Nearly 50 per cent of subscribers believed the biggest issue affecting United came from player performance. One can look into how the current squad came to be and whether they are playing a style of football best suited for them. One can also look at the Premier League table and come to the much shorter conclusion that the team underperformed. Something that is reiterated by our final question. Close to 90 per cent of respondents believed the side performed 'way below expectations', with only 1.6 per cent believing United performed as expected. 'The reflection of the coach is the league,' said Amorim to TNT Sports following United's Europa League comeback victory over Lyon at Old Trafford. 'You can be good in European games, but your reflection as a team is the league. We are underperforming, but then you have to see the context. You can see that we lack a lot of characteristics in our team.' Advertisement Everyone involved in Manchester United will have to work hard to address the missing characteristics. One survey cannot encapsulate the totality of a club as huge as United, but the overall message from our respondents is clear: things need to improve. And quickly.
New York Times
an hour ago
- New York Times
Football's capacity to make men cry: ‘I was buying milk and just burst into tears thinking about Palace'
Forget the scoreline in the top corner of the screen. The image of the distraught Inter Milan supporter who flashed up on television screens around the world, as his team prepared to take a meaningless corner in the 76th minute, told the story of the Champions League final. Crestfallen and broken, his bottom lip was quivering and tears were streaming down his face. A fourth Paris Saint-Germain goal had not long been scored at the other end of the stadium and it was all too much for a man who looked like his world had come to an end. 'Imagine getting like that about football?' It's hard to explain to people who have no interest in the game why so many of us are so immersed and emotionally invested in this sport that it leads to the kind of behaviour — uncontrollable tears (of joy as well as despair), hugging total strangers, or even turning the air blue after something totally innocuous — that would be almost unthinkable in a public space anywhere else. Advertisement Football, essentially, is escapism; a place for us to forget about the trials and tribulations of everyday life and, for better or worse, completely lose ourselves. 'It's a cathartic experience,' Sally Baker, a senior therapist, says. 'Men are very rarely given permission to express their emotions. But within the context of football, they are — and no one's going to judge them. Everyone's in it together. 'They could swear — people use language at a football match that they never would use outside. It's a safe place and it's a unique environment for men to let off steam.' Those comments resonate on the back of something else that happened last Saturday night in Munich. With less than two minutes remaining, the television cameras showed PSG's assistant coach in tears in the technical area. His name is Rafel Pol Cabanellas and he lost his wife to a long-term illness in November last year. With or without a heartbreaking personal story, football's capacity to stir the emotions is extraordinary. Carrying our hopes and fears, the game plays with our feelings in a way that few things in life can and, at the same time, provides a form of sanctuary. The video features crying. A lot of crying. It lasts for one minute and 24 seconds and was filmed at Wembley Stadium on the day of the FA Cup final. The referee's whistle had just blown after 10 minutes of stoppage time and Crystal Palace, after 164 years of waiting, had beaten Manchester City 1-0 to finally win the first major trophy in their history. Joao Castelo-Branco, ESPN Brazil's correspondent in the UK, had decided to leave his seat in the press box moments earlier to try to get some footage of the Palace supporters. To describe what follows as scenes of celebration doesn't come close. It's so much more than that. It's raw. It's magical. It's moving. It's genuinely heart-warming. It's football — that simple game that means nothing and everything — touching the soul. Advertisement 'It just captured something special,' Castelo-Branco says, smiling. So special that you find yourself watching it over and again, looking at the faces of the people — men and women, young and old — and thinking about all the stories they could tell you about how their lives became so entwined with Crystal Palace Football Club, as well as wondering why this moment means so much personally to them. 'When I was there, I was feeling, 'This is incredible, and I was just trying to hold it together',' Castelo-Branco says. 'There was so much going on that you don't know where to film. And I think sometimes then you see fans turning the camera everywhere really quickly. But I tried to hold on a bit, to rest at that couple, but then at the same time move on a bit to show that there were all these different characters that were celebrating. Everywhere I turned was a beautiful shot of emotion.' 'That couple' feature at the start of the footage, when a woman overcome with emotion falls into the arms of a man who looks like he has been following Palace for more years than he cares to remember. His eyes are filled with tears. Behind them, another supporter of a similar age stands alone with his arms aloft, totally overwhelmed by the moment. Some fans have their hands over their mouths in disbelief, almost frozen. Others are wiping away tears with their scarves. One man is hunched over, face down and sobbing. Another supporter — his father, perhaps — wraps his arms around him and the two of them end up singing together. People of all ages are crying everywhere you look — crying and smiling. 'It's beautiful,' Castelo-Branco adds. 'And a really special thing about it is that not many fans were filming (on their phones). People were really living that moment.' True raw emotion, fans really living the moment. As I joined in the stands to film this video, there were hardly any fans with their phones out. Grown men and women hugging and crying. Amazing atmosphere. #CrystalPalace beautiful ⚽️#Wembley #FACup — Joao Castelo-Branco (@j_castelobranco) May 18, 2025 Following Palace's triumph at Wembley, there were similar scenes a few days later in Bilbao, where Tottenham Hotspur beat Manchester United to win the Europa League. A couple of months earlier, it was Newcastle United's turn after they defeated Liverpool in the Carabao Cup final. But it doesn't have to be a long wait for a trophy that tips people over the edge at a football match. Gary Pickles remembers being in the away end at Brighton in 2019, when Manchester City were on the verge of winning their fourth Premier League title in eight seasons, holding up his phone, filming the fans all around him, and suddenly being stopped in his tracks. 'I noticed my son, Niall, had his hands on his head and tears were streaming down his face. We were winning the league. But he's really sobbing. I was like, 'What's up?' Whatever it was just triggered him. He was about 25 — it's not like a young kid doing it.' Pickles, who has been following Manchester City since the 1970s, makes an interesting point when we discuss whether his son's behaviour at Brighton is not as unusual as it would have been in the past. 'That video was just before Covid,' he says. 'But I think certainly since Covid, when there was a lot of talk about mental health issues, it's helped men to speak about that and maybe show their emotions.' Looking back provides a bit of context. In an article on the BBC website in 2004, under an image of the former England international Paul Gascoigne crying at the 1990 World Cup, a clinical psychologist talked about how 'a lot of men know more about how a car works than their own emotions'. Reading that quote again now, a couple of decades later, makes you realise how much life has changed – and in a relatively short space of time too (either that or all my mates are especially useless when it comes to knowing how to change a tyre). 'I think men have moved on hugely,' Baker, the senior therapist, says. 'I guess the old stereotype is that if men and sports were going to exhibit any emotions, it was normally anger. And there were apocryphal stories of women living in dread of their menfolk coming back if their team had lost. But men are more willing, and able, to express a fuller range of emotions than just anger. Advertisement 'I think they've changed a lot in the last 20 years. And I know that by the number of men I see. It used to be one man for every nine women I saw. And now it's much more like I'll see two men for every three women, so it's coming up to parity. There's a willingness to explore their own sense of self, what drives them and who they are.' That's not to say that men never cried at football in years gone by. When this topic of conversation came up in the office, my colleague Amy Lawrence told a story about being in the away end at Anfield in 1989, when Michael Thomas scored a dramatic late goal to clinch the league title for Arsenal against Liverpool on the final day, and how she was nowhere near her friends when she eventually came up for air amid the chaotic celebrations that followed. 'I found myself next to a guy who looked like your absolute classic 1980s football hooligan,' she said. 'He was massive. He was a skinhead. He was covered in tattoos. He looked terrifying. But he had tears rolling down his cheeks and he was blubbing like a baby. I can still see his face today. It was beautiful because he was the last type of person that you would ever expect to break down emotionally at a match.' The same can't be said for young Ricky Allman, who was only 11 years old when Leeds United were on their way to being relegated from the Premier League in 2004. With his shirt off and 'Leeds Til I Die' written across his chest, Allman was heartbroken as the television cameras homed in on him in the away end at Bolton Wanderers. Leeds were losing 4-1 and it was all too much for him. 'My bottom lip came out. A full-on, uncontrollable lip,' Allman told The Athletic in 2020. His mother, Beverley, was watching at home. 'She rang me in tears, 'Are you alright?' she said. You've been on telly. They panned on the crowd and you were crying — I haven't stopped crying since.'' Plenty of Palace fans were saying the same thing for a week or more after beating Manchester City. In Kevin Day's case, the initial sense of shock eventually gave way to tears in, of all places, his local supermarket. Advertisement 'For the first minute (after the final whistle) I couldn't speak,' the writer, comedian and lifelong Palace fan says. 'Then I looked around me and I was the only one not in tears. It was incredible. Mates of mine who I've known for so long, stoic people, who normally wouldn't cry… they were just broken. 'I've never felt elation like it. My son came round at 9am the next morning. He's 29. He threw himself into my arms like he hasn't done since he was a five-year-old. He was sobbing. 'And then, Monday morning, I was in the Co-op buying a pint of milk and I just suddenly burst into tears. I just thought to myself, 'The last time I was in here we hadn't won the FA Cup'.' Thinking about those who are no longer with us and unable to share a landmark moment can often trigger our emotions at football, as was almost certainly the case with the PSG coach Rafel Pol Cabanellas in Munich. It could be the memories of a grandparent who introduced someone to a club in the first place or, for Day, of his late father, who was always at the end of the phone to discuss the Palace match afterwards. 'Everyone I spoke to on that Saturday evening had someone they wished they could have called,' he says. 'There must have been about three million Palace fans looking down from heaven. 'On a serious note, though, I do wonder whether all the posters put up in pubs in south London over the last five years, about how it's alright to talk, have actually had a positive impact and that this generation of men do think it's alright to show their emotions. Maybe that message is finally getting through. 'Or maybe it's just any group of men where something happens that they've waited 120 years for, finally happens. I don't know. 'But I'm starting to get goosebumps thinking about it all again now.' (Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; Manan Vatsyayana/AFP, Odd Andersen, Jacques Feeney/Offside/Offside via Getty Images)
New York Times
an hour ago
- New York Times
Taylor Swift concerts and ‘lay and play' pitches – has Wembley finally become a financial asset for English football?
Seven years ago, before he spent £350million on a private members' club with a view of a football pitch, Fulham owner Shahid Khan tried to buy the most famous pitch in the world. The American billionaire's audacious and unsolicited offer for Wembley Stadium was £600million ($813m at current exchange rates) up front and £300m in future revenues from the venue's lucrative prawn-sandwich-brigade business. Advertisement Close to £1billion, then, which was about what the 90,000-capacity stadium cost to build, if you include all the financing costs. Of course, if he were only offering the English Football Association (FA) its money back on Wembley, their negotiations would have been brief. But when Khan made his move, the FA subsidiary that runs the venue had lost nearly £200million over two decades. It was also facing a maintenance bill of more than £70m, so Wembley was hardly the cash cow the project's cheerleaders had promised in the 1990s when the FA bought the site's old stadium so it could knock down its twin towers and build a modern, multi-purpose money-spinner. But by 2018, English football's governing body had been in the venue-management game for long enough to know two things: a) it is hard to make money at a stadium that is neither in use by a team every other week nor a regular stop on every touring band's schedule, and b) owning the country's best ground is a bad look when millions of amateurs and youngsters have to play on a decreasing number of poorly-kept pitches that flood and/or freeze in winter and become rutted crusts in spring. So, for an organisation struggling to find the money needed to make English football's grassroots facilities green and pleasant once more, Khan's offer was timely and tempting. After all, he was not threatening to knock down Wembley again, or stop using it for England games, cup finals, the play-offs, rugby league matches, boxing events and anything else he could squeeze in, including almost certainly more visits from his other team, the NFL's Jacksonville Jaguars. The FA, like almost every other football federation on the planet, would simply become a tenant of the largest stadium in the land, not its owner-operator. It is little wonder then that those who knew the numbers best, namely the FA board and its senior management team, thought this was a great idea, a view shared by many in the UK government, including the sports minister and Sport England, the public body that funds amateur sport around the country. Advertisement But football, as we all know, is an emotional game and the debate about whether to sell Wembley became a six-month war of words between those who saw this as a business decision to be taken rationally and those who viewed it as a test of patriotism. The latter opinion was personified by serial club owner Ken Bates, who told UK radio station Talksport that he initially thought Khan's proposal was 'a joke', that the FA lacked the 'moral authority' to sell Wembley as it belongs to all England fans, for generations to come, and that if it was really worried about grassroots facilities, it should ask the Premier League to pay for them. Yeah, his arguments became less cogent as he went on. Not that it really mattered, as enough people agreed that selling Wembley was tantamount to treason. The board had told Khan it would do the deal if it could get at least 60 per cent of the strange brew of executives from professional football and volunteer administrators from the amateur side on its 127-strong council to back the idea. But with the game's self-styled parliament split, FA chief executive Martin Glenn was forced to admit the proposal was 'more divisive than anticipated' and Khan pulled out, citing the absence of a 'definitive mandate'. Glenn would soon quit the FA, although he is now chair of the Football Foundation, the grassroots facilities charity that would have received and distributed most of Khan's cash, and the Pakistan-born U.S. autoparts magnate moved on. Neither he nor anyone else has tried to buy Wembley again. But what if somebody had? Would the FA have sold? Was the decision to leave Khan's offer on the table a failure of leadership or a lucky escape? The official line is that Wembley is making money now — an operating profit for Wembley National Stadium Limited (WNSL) of just over £30million in 2024 contributed to a healthy overall profit for the FA of just under £50m — and will make even more in the future, largely thanks to the 2023 decision to stop growing its pitches from grass seed in the stadium and instead bring in huge rolls of hybrid grass/plastic turf grown hundreds of miles away. Advertisement Known as 'lay and play', this solution to the problem of having to grow a new pitch every time you take a break from football to put on some concerts has significantly increased the number of large events Wembley can stage each summer. As the FA's head of grounds and surface transitions, Karl Standley, explained to The Athletic last month, he can now rip up an old pitch, roll out a new one and get it mowed and marked up for play all within four days. Last September, the FA gained permission from Brent Council, Wembley's local authority, to increase the number of large, or 'full bowl', events it can host every year from 46 to 54. Large is defined as anything with a capacity higher than 60,000, and Wembley is hosting 41 of those this year. It can host events with a capacity of 59,999 or fewer every day of the week, if it likes. The pitch Standley's crew laid this winter will get one more use on Saturday, when Hull Kingston Rovers play Warrington Wolves in rugby league's Challenge Cup final, before Wembley's staff switch into their summer uniforms for 12 nights of music, punctuated by the Oleksandr Usyk vs Daniel Dubois heavyweight boxing bill in mid-July. A second pitch of the year will be delivered for Liverpool vs Crystal Palace in the Community Shield, set to be played on August 10, only to be ripped up for 10 nights of Coldplay and two more helpings of the Oasis reunion whip-round. Come October, a third pitch will arrive for England men's friendly against Wales, the Jaguars' annual visit (Khan is still a fan of Wembley's 90,000 seats) and an England-Australia rugby league game, with November's England vs Serbia World Cup qualifier bringing the curtain down on what promises to be an even better year financially than 2024's Taylor Swift-powered profit after tax of £28million. Surely that means player-turned-property developer Gary Neville was right in 2018 when he said, 'Whatever you do, don't sell Wembley', right? Yes… and no. It is a little complicated, but that 2024 profit followed a £66million loss a year earlier. While the revenues were higher than in 2023, so were the costs, but the real difference between the two sets of numbers was an impairment charge of £46m in 2023 that was reversed in 2024. In accounting, an impairment is made when a company's directors believe the market value of an asset has fallen below its book value. For an asset as complicated as Wembley, with a large and lucrative premium-ticket offering, that assessment is very sensitive to interest-rate movements, the state of the economy, how well England's teams are playing and which music stars are coming to town in the summer. Advertisement If we ignore the 2023 impairment and the 2024 reversal, as they cancel each other out, we are left with a business that lost £38million over two years. This is a big improvement from the kick in the shins that was Covid-19, a vindication for the move to 'lay and play', which is not cheap, and confirmation that the corporate tagline of 'It means more at Wembley' might be more than just marketing babble. It does not mean Wembley is actually making real money for the FA, however. Not when you include all of WNSL's costs, such as depreciation, intra-company loans and the wages of the hundreds of FA staff who support the stadium company's work. But it is definitely getting close to breaking even and may, with a fair economic wind and a few more mega-star residencies, actually become the net contributor it was built to be. Speaking to journalists in March, Mark Bullingham, who replaced Glenn as CEO in 2019, explained how the FA had used the pre-grown pitches and increased major-event cap to grow Wembley's revenues. He also said WNSL had started charging tour promoters for every day they have access to the stadium as opposed to just the day of the actual show. He said that has incentivised them to book multiple nights, not one-offs, which is something a venue can only do from a position of strength, another testament to the work being done by the 80-strong events team. There is a certain irony that when Khan made his offer, Wembley was turning a small profit thanks to a residency that went on much longer than anyone initially expected: Tottenham Hotspur's near two-season stay at the stadium while they built their £1billion new home. That venue has 27,000 fewer seats than Wembley but has become the FA's only real rival as the London stop on a global stadium tour. The publicly-owned London Stadium, West Ham United's home ground, has six events this summer, including the world's largest chicken-wing festival and two nights of Metallica; the Allianz Stadium in Twickenham, the home of English rugby union, was originally booked for a night of K-pop stars this month but ticket sales were so poor it has moved across town to the much-smaller O2 Arena indoor venue; Arsenal's Emirates Stadium has two nights of Robbie Williams. Spurs, on the other hand, have 18 concerts this summer, including a six-date stint by Beyonce, plus two NFL games in October. It has already hosted a sold-out rugby union match and a big night of British boxing this year. Asked if their former tenants had stolen any of Wembley's business, Bullingham said: 'Not that we've seen, no. 'We do compete sometimes for the music acts but, as a result of live streaming and music acts needing to make a lot more money from live performances, we've seen a growth in that market over the last few years, and we've definitely benefited from that. And we have the advantage that a lot of music acts want to play at Wembley because it's a big status symbol for them.' Advertisement Paul Smyth, Wembley Stadium's general manager, agrees. 'We haven't necessarily stolen a march on them, but we've got 90,000 seats,' he explained. 'Tottenham have found a really good spot that is north of The O2's capacity (around 20,000), but south of ours. Obviously, you could make more money at Wembley, but a promoter has to make sure the shows sell out — it's damaging for an artist to play a venue that's too big for them.' Smyth, who started in the FA's ticketing team 20 years ago, was speaking to The Athletic in April, a few hours before Wembley opened its doors for the first of this season's FA Cup semi-finals, between Palace and Aston Villa. 'Ultimately, our commercial opportunity exists in the live-events season — we already do all of the football,' he said, matter-of-factly. 'We used to finish the concerts in the first weekend in July, because that's when we used to grow the pitch from seed. We'd then have the Community Shield and just move on into the rest of our sports season. We now run right into the first weekend in August and can have a concert on one Saturday night and football the following weekend. 'Last year, Taylor Swift did two shows before the Community Shield, as well as AC/DC and the rest, we then converted back into a football ground, played 90 minutes of football and killed the pitch six hours later. And that will happen every year going forward. 'Next year is even busier. More events, more sport, things like the (Khan-owned) All Elite Wrestling we've had the last two years, the Jaguars and as many Lionesses (England's women's football team) games as we can. We'll do 44 large events this year, 25 concerts plus the football, but it will be closer to 50 next year, with a 60/40 split on non-football and football events.' Smyth explained that one way to fit more events in is to book younger artists rather than 'legacy' (aka, older) ones. Advertisement 'Some of the artists we've got next year are relatively condensed in the number of nights they're doing,' he said. 'They will do consecutive nights, which means we can crowbar another act into the window. But if you had a legacy act, the kind that does the Sunday slot at Glastonbury, they may need three days off between shows. 'But you'll get some bands who just want a night off after each show because they've been on the road for a year. It's not that they can't do back-to-back, they've just earned the right for a night off.' This is a point I have tried to make to my bosses, but it seems I have not reached the status of 'Legends' slot at Glastonbury Festival yet. 'What sets us apart is the iconic nature and status of the stadium itself,' added Smyth. 'But that's only one part of it. We want to be the best, the most frictionless, experience that any act or promoter can have on any leg of the tour. 'February through to June, we're a football stadium, and not just any football stadium. We're the football stadium, and that's what everyone's focus is on. But when we hit June through to the Community Shield, we're a live-event venue and every event is as important as the last. The second it's not, we're not doing the job.' Watching what that FA Cup semi-final victory meant to Palace and their fans — and the defeat to Villa and theirs — it was easy to see what Smyth meant about Wembley still being the football stadium and things mattering more there. It certainly felt that way to me and my family when we watched our team, Southend United, lose a dramatic National League play-off final to Oldham Athletic there last weekend. But I am still not convinced the FA made the right call in rejecting Khan's offer in 2018 — and I am not alone. 'There is no doubt it was madness not to take the money,' said a senior football official, who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity to avoid upsetting anyone. 'They have done well in driving up revenue and paying off the construction debt early (which the FA achieved in 2023). But they are still not experts at running venues. You need access to a network of venues and the ability to put tours together to create the economies of scale. Advertisement 'If a similar offer were to be made today, it would be considered much more objectively, rather than people worrying about their futures in the game.' Another former FA official, again speaking off the record to stay on peoples' Christmas card lists, told me they still think it was 'a good deal' and Wembley is 'an operational distraction' for a national governing body that should be focused on providing affordable, fun and safe spaces for everyone to play the game, developing coaches, training referees, supporting local leagues and winning World Cups. Maybe you can do all that and run a world-class venue, he said. Maybe the venue can help to pay for the providing, developing, training, supporting and winning. 'There are views on both sides,' he admitted. We shall see. In the meantime, we can safely say that FA Cup semi-finals will never again be played at a Hillsborough in Sheffield or Birmingham's Villa Park. Like Khan's offer, that ship has sailed and only a Taylor Swift double-booking that April weekend could ever bring it back.
