Now that the World Cup is over......

To compare it to baseball ...

The Prem would be MLB. Best of the best. Top of the pops.

The FA Cup ("Football Association") would be like every team from, say, Single-A to MLB in one tournament, winner take all.

So if you think the Columbus Clippers can beat the Pittsburgh Pirates ... here's your chance! EDIT: Pairings are drawn completely at random, as is location. You usually don't have to wait long for a monumental upset in the FA Cup. Biggest one was probably 1988, lowly Wimbledon def. Liverpool (at that time, the N.Y. Yankees of English football) to win the Cup.

If you win the Premier League and the FA Cup in the same season, it's called <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Double">The Double</a>. Only happened 7 times in the 20th century. Manchester United won the Treble in 1999: the Prem, the FA Cup and the Champions League. No English club has pulled that trifecta before or since.

American soccer also has the U.S. Open Cup (and has for most of the last century), and MLS teams can get beaten by A-League teams, etc. It's going on as we speak. In fact, I believe Chivas USA just did get beat by some lower-division team(!)