Four teams remain in the delayed but no-less-important Football Association Cup, the English soccer tournament that pits the best of the top leagues against each other to see who's the best in the United Kingdom. The initial rounds started all the way back in August 2019 and took a couple months off to deal with the global pandemic before closing out June with the quarterfinals.
All four teams in this weekend's semifinals are from the Premier League, England's top level. (That's not always the case.)
Up first? Arsenal taking on Manchester City on Saturday, July 18, at 2:45 p.m. Eastern (that's 20:45 local time), from Wembley Stadium.
Manchester United and Chelsea play in the other semifinal on Sunday at Wembley.
Man City dispatched Premier League colleague Newcastle in the quarterfinals in their last FA cup game, and it beat Sheffield Wednesday (a level down in the English Football League Championship) in the round before that. On the Premier side of things, Man City is second in the tables behind Liverpool (which wrapped up the Premier League title weeks ago but fell to Chelsea in the Elite 8 of the FA Cup). Man City has won four of its last five league games — including a 4-0 shellacking of Liverpool — and dropping a single match to Southampton.
Arsenal, meanwhile, followed much the same route. It beat fellow Premier League team Sheffield United in the quarterfinals, and EFL team Reading before that. The Gunners stand in the middle of the Premier League pack a ninth, managing three wins, a loss and a draw in their previous five league games.
The winners of this weekend's semifinal matches will meet in the FA Cup final on Saturday, Aug. 1.
How to watch Arsenal vs. Manchester City in the United States
Despite this being a pretty big game in a pretty big tournament, you won't find Saturday's game on any of the major networks. Instead, it's on ESPN+, which is the streaming arm of the venerable sports network.
That's not necessarily a bad thing — ESPN+ is available pretty on much every platform out there, including Roku, Apple TV, Android TV, smartphones and tablets, Xbox, and web browsers. It's also affordable at $4.99 a month, and it's available as part of the epic $12.99-a-month ESPN+/Hulu/Disney+ bundle.
The only way to watch this weekend's FA Cup semifinals.
How to watch Arsenal vs. Manchester City if you're in the UK
Look, there should be nary a television that doesn't have this game on come Saturday. And those televisions — be they in a pub or a flat or just dragged out into the street so that we may all keep the proper distance from each other — will be tuned to BT Sport 1 for this match.
(Sunday's Match between Chelsea and Man United will be on BBC 1.)
