Some weird things have been happening to the FA Cup of late, with fifth-round replays being arbitrarily abolished and the final being played at Tottenham’s home ground last season. Nothing will make football followers of a certain age feel quite as seasick, though, as contemplating this weekend’s third-round programme.

That word is a bit of a giveaway there, because the FA Cup third round never used to be a programme – it used to be a fixed point in the football season and perhaps the most eagerly anticipated one at that. It would probably be wise to keep the nostalgia to a minimum here, but for the benefit of younger readers, this is what used to happen.

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The Monday lunchtime when the third-round draw was made would feature transistor radios being sneaked into workplaces and schools, because people all over the country could not bear to be kept waiting for a second too long before finding out which opponents their team had been assigned.

The FA Cup was important then, you see. It had glamour. The chance of ending up at Wembley was a thing, even for supporters of big clubs. It was tradition, it was history, it was English football coming together, and it would all take place at 3pm on the first Saturday in January.

With 32 ties in the third round, 64 teams would be involved. That meant slightly more than two-thirds of the professional teams in the country would line up against each other in a random format with an unpredictable outcome. The piquancy of the mix was usually enhanced by non-league part-timers who had battled through the earlier rounds, complete with unsuitable stadiums, bumpy surfaces, inclement weather and hordes of adolescents awaiting their chance to stage a pitch invasion and make a brief appearance on Match of the Day.

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This used to be how the season annually renewed itself at the halfway stage. By then it was usually clear to most supporters that their chances of league glory might have to wait another year or two, but a Cup run could happen to almost anyone. And, as previously advertised, when the whistle went at 3pm everyone was in it together – at least until 5pm, by which time dreams had died or miracles had taken place, and the identity of the 32 teams still left in the competition was known – apart from the ones who would have to do it all again in a replay.

You can probably see where this is going. There are still 32 ties and 64 teams involved in this weekend’s third round, but a measly 10 of the games will kick off at 3pm on Saturday, as a new six-season overseas broadcast deal comes into effect. Seven ties start earlier, five later, there are eight games on Sunday, one on Friday night and one on Monday. There is no point getting upset about it – we live in the television era now and the FA Cup is no one’s idea of a big deal anyway.

The nation no longer comes together on Cup final day in the way it used to, because live football on TV is not a magnetic rarity any more. When many of the bigger teams in the third round will be fielding weakened teams because they regard the competition as an inessential inconvenience, it would obviously be silly to pine for a time when 3pm on one particular Saturday used to rival the Grand National for tales of the unexpected.

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So no more sepia-toned longing for the land of lost content – the FA Cup is not what it used to be and that is all there is to it. You will hear a lot about magic and romance this weekend, but it will mostly be the TV rights holders trying to inject some semblance of life into a clearly stiffening corpse. We all know deep down there are not going to be any updates to the stock images of Ronnie Radford’s goal, John Motson’s sheepskin coat or pitches being inundated by parka wearers, yet perhaps that fondly recalled folk history is not really where the magic used to lie.

What was actually special about the FA Cup once was that it brought everyone together. Everyone was in it, everyone wanted to win it and even getting close enough to Wembley to be able to sniff the hot dogs, as Everton’s former manager Gordon Lee once put it, was a thrill.

Football is not the same sort of community any more. The advent of the Premier League and Champions League shifted priorities and encouraged leading clubs to pursue their own interests. The FA Cup was a loser in that process and it is hard to see how its former grandeur can ever return, though without a day to celebrate the fact that everyone is supposed to be playing the same game, we have all lost out a little.