Football: Cargills to partner FA Cup for fourth consecutive year

In a strong push to develop Sri Lanka Football, Cargills Food City has come forward to sponsort the FA Cup Championship for the fourth consecutive year.

The tournament, organised and conducted by the Football Federation of Sri Lanka (FFSL) was launched last week in Colombo.

The competition will consist of 672 teams from 65 leagues with the preliminary rounds being conducted at league level on knockout basis. 

Accordingly each league will hold knock out rounds for its clubs and the champions from each league will progress to the next round. 

A total of 60, sans the five services teams, will progress and be added to the 31 teams who were among the final 32 team of the Cargills Food City FA Cup 2015. 

Out of the qualified 60 teams six teams will receive bys, 54 teams will play a second round, also on knockout basis. 

The qualifying 27 teams will go into a draw with the remaining 37 teams and the final 64 teams will be drawn to play the third stage of the Cargills Food City FA Cup 2016.

Prior to entering from the total of 91 teams, 29 will receive the go to the next round based on their performance in the FA Cup last year. 

A draw will be held to fix the matches for this round.

The other two teams to feature in the finals was Colombo FC who won the trophy in 2014 and Renown SC who fell to Army SC last time around. 

However due to the knockout style of the competition there are no favorites going into this cup tournament.

Cargills Food City the title sponsor of the FA Cup in Sri Lanka were the first to introduce the original FA Cup style trophy to the local version of this long standing tradition of football. 

Globally the FA Cup is an underdog fan’s dream where the possibility of a minnow becoming a giant is real at every stage of the game.