The FA Cup.

Few in North America have a clear idea of what this is about. Aside from hipsters or kids who studied abroad for a year and now believe they are entitled to make generalizations about European “football” to their oh-so-sheltered friends back home.

Anyway, the FA (Football Association) Cup is a soccer tournament held every year for clubs in England and Wales, and just about every club in those country’s plays, right down to amateur small-town sides compete, and this year that number ran to 737 teams.

It’s England’s version of the NCAA Tournament. Except we should say the NCAA Tournament is the U.S. version of the FA Cup, because the latter is much, much older. Like, going-back-to-1871-72 old. As well as much bigger.

And if the NCAA Tournament has six or seven Cinderellas, the FA Cup has about 600, and it has scads more “absolutely ridiculous victories by the little guy” than does the NCAA basketball.

Today, we are interested in two concepts pertaining to the Cup.

1. The dirty little secret that most of the elite teams, one of whom is very likely to win the Cup, don’t really care about the Cup anymore, until they are in the semifinals;

2. And the other being that a quirk of the FA Cup just cost the UAE a visit from Manchester City and a high-visibility friendly with the UAE side Al Ain — who are opening a 25,000-seat stadium.

How did this happen?

As to the first notion, that none of the good teams really care about the Cup, the explanation is outlined quite nicely by Jonathan Wilson in the pages of The National.

In short, the only goals that matter to England’s (and Wales’s) top teams are 1) staying in the Premier League and 2) finishing in the top four so as to play in the European Champions League.

Those two competitions are worth millions and millions. The FA Cup is, by comparison, a penny-ante competition that often screws up the plans of elite teams by tempting them to use their first XI in games against lower-division teams like Brighton & Hove Albion and Stevenage — when they could be resting their stars for things that matter.

Several Premier League coaches said that over the weekend, in no uncertain terms.

Aston Villa’s coach called the Cup “a distraction” and Sam Allardyce, perhaps the most English of all Premier League coaches, said: “It is a fantastic competition and has great history and tradition, there is no doubt about that. But if you’re in a position where we are and with the injuries we have, there is only one major priority at this football club (and) that priority lies with the Premier League.”

Allardyce, aka “Big Sam”, coaches West Ham United, and his club is in a relegation fight, and to be relegated could threaten the very existence of a club.

In his comment, Jonathan Wilson notes that Wigan won the FA Cup last year (in a shocking upset of Manchester City), the first significant trophy in the club’s history, but then was relegated from the Premier League. He muses whether Wigan might have stayed up if they hadn’t been playing so many Cup games … and whether Wigan fans, 10 years from now, would trade that FA Cup for continued existence in the Premier League.

Second, the FA Cup and the UAE.

Manchester City is owned by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed, a member of the Abu Dhabi ruling family, and he had arranged for City — perhaps the best team in the league — to fly down to the UAE in midweek to play Al Ain on January 14, part of the big ramping up to opening the stadium, the most ornate (if not the biggest) stadium in the country.

However, Manchester City today had the bad idea of allowing Blackburn, from the Championship (second division) to tie them, and an old-fashioned rule in the FA Cup calls for a “replay” of the match to get a winner.

In most other competitions, these days, the teams would go ahead and finish that game. First 30 minutes of extra time, and then a shootout. Not the FA Cup.

So, Manchester City will be playing Blackburn again on January 14 (or 15) — meaning no trip to the UAE or game against Al Ain.

Al Ain is left scrambling for a new opponent for the stadium-opening friendly because City’s schedule is so jammed this month that the one semi-break (five days) they had just disappeared.

So, the FA Cup … the downsides of a grand old (perhaps archaic) competition can be felt even in the UAE, thousands of miles away England.