The Value of the Carabao Cup Beyond the Prize Money
Aston Villa’s Carabao Cup third round brought a routine-looking 3-1 win away at Coventry City, but for Unai Emery the game proved more useful than simply getting through to the next round. With Villa’s preseason disrupted by late-arriving signings and outgoings, Emery has had little time to prepare his squad for the 2026/27 season, and low-stakes cup ties have become one of the only places to actually bed players in.
That usefulness may not last. Once Champions League fixtures start stacking up on the calendar, it remains to be seen how much priority Emery continues to give the competition. But if Villa’s league form doesn’t pick up, and they get past Bournemouth at the end of October, suddenly they’ll find themselves in December’s quarter-finals, and the calculation could change.
Carabao Cup Round Dates
- Round Four: w/c 26 October 2026
- Round Five: w/c 14 December 2026
- Semi-Final First Leg: w/c 11 January 2027
- Semi-Final Second Leg: w/c 1 February 2027
- Final: Sunday 21 March 2027
European Context
Emery has qualified for Europe in 17 straight seasons as a manager, and if the Premier League route to a European place becomes riddled with poor form, the Carabao Cup could provide a useful backdoor to maintain that run, with the tournament’s importance to the Villa boss growing accordingly.
What it certainly isn’t about, though, is the money.
Carabao Cup Prize Money and Pay Outs
The Carabao Cup does not work the way most supporters assume. There is no prize pot distributed round by round, and no bonuses for progressing through the early stages. The competition has a different financial structure entirely, one that explains why its relevance, and clubs’ interest in it, has dropped in the modern game.
Prize money in the Carabao Cup is reserved almost entirely for the business end of the competition. The winners receive £100,000, the runners-up take £50,000 and clubs who lose at the semi-final stage receive £25,000 each. Before that point, there are no specific performance-related prize payments.
Instead, clubs earn revenue through other routes. For Carabao Cup ties, the net gate receipts are shared equally between the competing clubs, with each receiving 45 per cent, while the remaining 10 per cent goes into the competition’s central pool. A lower-league club drawn away at a ground with 40,000 seats can therefore earn a significant sum simply from playing the tie.
Broadcast fees provide another income stream. Under the current broadcasting deal, every Carabao Cup match is available live on Sky Sports or Sky Sports+, but clubs selected for the relevant main-channel coverage can receive additional facility fees starting at £75,000, with payments increasing as teams progress deeper into the competition.
Across the competition as a whole, the Carabao Cup is worth around £110m per season to the EFL, with approximately £70m going to EFL clubs through central distributions, in addition to direct earnings received by clubs from individual ties.
Carabao Cup Role for Villa
For a club operating in the Champions League, the Carabao Cup prize money is almost incidental. Villa earned more than €2.1m in additional prize money from their opening Champions League victory over Club Brugge in September — a single result in a single group match. The entire Carabao Cup winners prize is less than a tenth of that.
The comparison with the FA Cup is almost as stark. Its winners this season are set to collect just over £2.1m, in the same ballpark as Villa’s single Champions League win over Brugge, and more than 20 times what the Carabao Cup pays its champions.
For Premier League clubs, especially those with European commitments, the Carabao Cup’s financial logic carries little weight. For Emery this season, though, it isn’t worthless: its value just lies elsewhere.
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