SOME people in football believe the answer to every problem is another competition, another tournament, another round of matches — and another opportunity to sell something.
Then Fleetwood Town come and remind us the best thing about the game can’t be manufactured, marketed or guaranteed. It’s the possibility the impossible might happen.
The League Two club beat Premier League champions Arsenal on penalties to reach the quarter- finals of the Carabao Cup.
Cod Army are 84 places below the Gunners in the football pyramid and their visitors arrived with huge resources, an expensive squad and expectation they would go through.
But they left with a defeat that will live in Fleetwood folklore.
For a small club, it’s not just another fixture done but a night fans will tell grandchildren about.
Players become heroes, photographs go on walls and the result takes on a life of its own.
That is the romance of football, and it remains one of the most valuable things the sport possesses.
But the shock did raise the question over how much football is too much football?
Mikel Arteta made nine changes but still had Viktor Gyokeres and Kai Havertz starting up front and Martin Odegaard also came on. It was not a team of strangers dragged off the training ground.
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But the changes were significant as Arsenal looked ahead to a top-flight trip to Liverpool tomorrow.
Managers do not rotate to confuse fans but because players need rest, injuries accumulate and the consequences of running a squad into the ground can be far more damaging than an early domestic cup exit.
Arteta had a decision to make. He could prioritise this competition or manage the demands of a season in which every available date seems to have acquired a commercial purpose.
He chose to rotate and they lost but it’s unfair to suggest the selection alone cost them the game.
Fleetwood defended magnificently, their keeper Jay Lynch made crucial saves and their players took their penalties with extraordinary composure.
They deserved their moment.
That does not make the wider question any less important.
The Premier League is a global phenomenon and the Champions League has expanded while Fifa has enlarged the Club World Cup and shape an international calendar that hit elite players hard.
Each development arrives with an attractive sales pitch: more football, opportunities and revenue — and a bigger audience.
There is nothing inherently wrong with ambition as football is a business and money generated at the top helps support jobs and the wider game.
But there is a difference between growing a sport and assuming that its capacity for growth is unlimited.
The calendar is not an empty spreadsheet waiting to be filled, it contains human beings who need to recover, clubs that need to prepare and fans with finite time and money.
When another competition is added, something else has to give.
It can be recovery time or the quality of a performance or just the chance for a young player to develop without unreasonable burden. And sometimes it is just the competition itself.
The irony is football’s administrators risk damaging the very product they are trying to sell. Supporters do not fall in love with fixture lists.
They fall in love with stories, rivalries, moments of brilliance and knowing their club, however small, can achieve the extraordinary.
The FA Cup and the League Cup have always offered that hope and their value lies partly in the imbalance between the clubs taking part.
A little club versus the giant isn’t a flaw to be corrected; it’s the point.
If elite clubs increasingly have to treat domestic cup ties as obstacles to be managed around, the consequences will eventually reach beyond their own dressing rooms.
Smaller clubs depend on these occasions for revenue, exposure and memories money alone cannot buy so they need the big clubs to take the competitions seriously.
So Fifa and the other governing bodies should listen to concerns about congestion. It’s not an argument against international football or a demand that the richest clubs should always get their own way.
It is a call for decisions to take proper account of those who play it, run it and pay to watch it.
Fleetwood did not try to make a point about governance, they just took their chance to make history.
Arsenal’s resources could not buy a place in the next round and their hosts earned it the hard way.
Football’s rulers would do well to remember that distinction. They can sell the game around the world, expand competitions and calculate commercial value to the last pound.
But they cannot manufacture the feeling when a club that was never supposed to win discovers it can.
That is football’s magic. The challenge is to make sure that — in the rush to sell more of it — we do not lose what makes it worth watching in the first place.