FA Cup preliminary round: a 10-1 and two clubs on debut
Most people join the FA Cup in January. By then it has been running for five months.
The 2026-27 competition started on 8 August with the extra preliminary round, played its preliminary round on 22 August across 136 scheduled ties, and reaches the first qualifying round this Saturday, 5 September. The Premier League has played two matchdays in the same period. The cup is already two rounds ahead of it.
The result of the round
Hashtag United beat Enfield 10-1, the biggest score anywhere in the round and a rare thing in any cup tie at any level. It is worth its own article, and it has one, because the club had asked to be relegated five months earlier on the grounds that the division above was financially unsustainable.
Behind it came Pontefract Collieries 8-0 against Parkgate, Thame United 7-1 against Brislington, and a pair of 6-0 wins — Weymouth over Shepton Mallet and Lye Town over Lichfield City. Hayes and Yeading United won 6-3 against White Ensign in the highest-scoring tie that was actually competitive.
Two clubs played their first FA Cup tie
AFC Greenwich Borough made their debut in the competition and won 4-2 away at Cray Valley Paper Mills. Petts Wood and Holmesdale, also playing their first ever FA Cup match, won 5-1 at Raynes Park Vale.
Both are through to the first qualifying round, which means both have already won more FA Cup ties than they had ever played. For a club entering a competition that began in 1871, a first win in it is the sort of afternoon that ends up on a wall in the clubhouse.
The comeback that did not quite work
The tie of the round for drama was Ware against Leverstock Green. Ware led 5-0. Leverstock Green scored three times in the final five minutes and lost 5-3.
Elsewhere Redcar Town came from behind in the second half to beat Bridlington Town 2-1, and Cornard United edged Histon 4-3. None of these matches were televised and all of them were decided in front of crowds a Premier League ground would not register.
Why the early rounds are worth watching
There is a version of the FA Cup that exists only in January, when a Premier League manager rests eight players and a commentator says the word magic. The competition people actually mean when they talk about that magic is the one being played right now, and almost nobody covers it.
These are clubs where the players work during the week, the ground holds a few hundred, and the trip to the next round is paid for by whoever is behind the bar. A 10-1 win or a first ever tie is a genuinely large event in that context, in a way that a fourth-round replay is not for anyone at the top of the pyramid.
What happens on Saturday
The first qualifying round is on 5 September, and it is the point where the competition starts to feel less like a local knockout and more like a national one. The clubs that survive it go into the second qualifying round on 19 September, the third on 3 October and the fourth on 17 October.
Only then does the competition proper begin, with the first round on 7 November and the second on 5 December.
And when the big clubs arrive
Premier League and Championship clubs do not enter until the third round proper, on Saturday 9 January 2027. That is six rounds after this Saturday, and it is the single most misunderstood thing about the competition: by the time the famous names appear, a non-league club that has reached the same stage has already won six ties to get there.
From there it runs to the fourth round on 13 February, the fifth on 6 March, the quarter-finals on 3 April, the semi-finals on 24 April and the final at Wembley on Saturday 22 May 2027.
That is fourteen rounds in total, from a Saturday in August to a Saturday in May. Hashtag United, AFC Greenwich Borough and Petts Wood and Holmesdale have won one or two of them. The distance to Wembley is absurd, which is precisely why anybody bothers.
One caveat on the results above: they are the ties the FA highlighted from the round, not a complete list. With 136 fixtures scheduled on the same afternoon, no summary covers all of them, and this one does not pretend to. If your club played on 22 August and is not mentioned here, that is a limitation of the sources rather than a verdict on the match.
The next date to keep is Saturday 5 September. After that the competition thins quickly: four qualifying rounds across six weeks, and by the middle of October the field will be down to the clubs that will still be in it when the first round proper is drawn in November.