The FA Cup, inaugurated in 1872, is the oldest football competition in the world, its final played at Wembley Stadium most years since the ground reopened in 2007.
The FA Cup Final returns to Wembley Stadium on Saturday 22 May 2027, the closing fixture of English football’s oldest knockout competition.
The FA Cup was inaugurated in 1872 and is the oldest football competition in the world, older than every league and every international tournament in the game. Its final has been played at Wembley for most of the last century, moved to Cardiff between 2001 and 2006 while the stadium was rebuilt, and returned on 19 May 2007 to open the new ground. It is regularly one of the best-attended club matches played in England.
What has kept it is the draw. Every round pairs clubs at random, with no seeding and no second leg, so a non-league side can be drawn at a Premier League ground and occasionally wins there. The competition reaches a long way down the pyramid: the club that lifts the trophy in May has come through a bracket that started in August with teams most people have never heard of.
The 2027 semi-finals are played at the same ground four weeks earlier, on 24 April, so the finalists are known a month ahead. Both clubs take the bulk of the allocation, the rest distributed through the game rather than sold to the public. It remains the only domestic final in England that a fourth-tier club has a mathematical route to.