You’d have to wonder how the senior management of Carling UK Ltd view their multi million pound investment in one of English football’s so-called premier competitions.

 
With all due respect, to see the likes of those traditional English football heavyweights Derby County and Burnley arriving in the semi-finals of the Carling Cup hardly threatens to match the passion and excitement of a Champions League semi-final such as Inter Milan against Chelsea. Sure, Tottenham, the holders, and Manchester United are also in the last four and the sponsors will pray that tomorrow’s semi-finals draw keeps them apart. But the point still applies.

 
The latest blow to Carling’s sponsorship of what was once the old League Cup in England, came this week when a bunch of Arsenal kids, wannabes and unknowns crashed ignominiously to a 2-0 defeat at Turf Moor, the Lancashire home of Burnley.

 
Of course, clubs like Arsenal, Manchester United, Chelsea and Liverpool have been playing ducks and drakes with this competition for longer than most can recall. They see it as no more than a proving ground for some kids who might or might not make it one day in professional football. They rarely risk their major stars; in their eyes, there are far more important, lucrative trophies to pursuit. This one is seen as a rank outsider, of peripheral interest.

 
Yet the strange thing is, none of the bigger clubs ever backs its stand of disinterest by declining to take the sponsor’s shilling. There is never any question of clubs who deliberately field weakened teams, refusing to accept a cheque from the tournament’s backers. They trouser that come what may.

 
Just as worringly, there are now clear signs that the lack of interest among these major clubs now stretches to include another English tournament, the F.A. Cup. Once regarded as the premier cup competition in the world, last season even saw lowly sides like Bolton Wanderers, at the time fighting desperately to survive in the Premiership, shunning the F.A. Cup by fielding seriously weakened sides.

 
Their reasoning was that Premiership survival was all that mattered. You could mess about with a so-called minor competition like the F.A. Cup and no-one would care. Perhaps the fact that Portsmouth won the trophy last May, beating Cardiff City in a technically sub-standard Wembley final, underlined that point.

 
Yet I doubt whether anyone bothered to tell Carling or E-On, sponsors of the F.A. Cup, that they were being asked to sign up to sponsorship of increasingly unimportant competitions in the eyes of the big clubs. Oh yes, the final would still be staged at Wembley but it’s like the world of acting – if Dame Helen Mirren, Dame Judy Dench and Sir Anthony Hopkins have all turned their backs on a London play, you can still stage it in the West End. But much value does it have, how much relevance and how much is it worth to the paying customer? Very little, is the answer.

 
There is just one problem with this attitude of selectivity on the part of the Premiership clubs. What if the sponsors, especially in these increasingly tough financial times, start to shun these competitions, aware surely nowadays that their company name or brand is being associated with a low-level event, an inferior product. If you were the Chairman of a major company, would you defend the notion of spending millions to be associated with a competition that has become of minor importance?

 
If the companies decide they will turn their backs, then who will fill the financial void for English football. Of course, the big boys chasing Premiership and Champions League glory won’t care. But you can bet the smaller clubs, the likes of Burnley, Derby County and Cardiff, will feel the pinch and badly so.

 
But then, would anyone at Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester United or Liverpool care about that? In contemporary times, English football clubs are interested only in themselves, no-one and nothing else. It’s a dangerous game that is being played here and it could come home to haunt a lot of the smaller clubs in this land.