Which Club Has Won the Most FA Cups? Arsenal’s Record

At the time of writing, Arsenal and Manchester United are the only clubs with double-figure totals. Behind their 14 and 13 wins respectively, Chelsea, Liverpool, Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester City have eight each. Aston Villa have seven, while Newcastle United and Blackburn Rovers have six apiece. That gives Arsenal a clear advantage over most of the traditional cup heavyweights, even if United are within touching distance. It also shows why success in the league is not a reliable shortcut to answering this question: the FA Cup has its own hierarchy.

United made the race particularly tight by beating Manchester City 2–1 in the 2024 final, securing their 13th title. Their first came in 1909, earlier than Arsenal’s breakthrough. One useful distinction here is that this is a ranking of trophies won, not finals reached or matches won across the competition. A losing finalist does not add to its title total, however memorable the journey. Equally, being the latest winner does not make a club the all-time record holder: those are separate honours, and they can belong to very different teams.

How Arsenal built their FA Cup record

Arsenal’s record stretches from their first success in 1930 to their 14th in 2020, but the modern part of that story carries considerable weight. They won the competition eight times between 1998 and 2020, accounting for more than half their overall haul. That matters when assessing the record: this is not simply an advantage accumulated in the distant past and preserved ever since. Arsenal repeatedly added to their total during an era when the competition also featured strong challenges from Manchester United and the other leading English clubs.

Arsène Wenger is central to that success. He won seven FA Cups as Arsenal manager, a competition record at the time of writing and exactly half of the club’s 14 titles. It is a neat statistic with a substantial achievement behind it: one manager contributed as many wins as Aston Villa’s entire total. Club and managerial records should still be kept separate, though. Arsenal’s tally includes victories outside Wenger’s tenure, while his seven wins measure his own success in the dugout rather than the complete history of the club.

The rivalry with Manchester United supplies one of the clearest snapshots of Arsenal’s cup story. Between 1998 and 2005, those two clubs won the competition six times between them. They met in the 2005 final, which Arsenal won on penalties after a 0–0 draw. For the record books, that trophy counts exactly as much as one secured through a free-flowing attacking display. That is part of the appeal of knockout football: there are no extra titles for style, and finding a way through a tense final can be every bit as valuable as dominating it.

What the FA Cup record does, and does not, tell us

The FA Cup began in the 1871–72 season and is the world’s oldest national football competition, so its honours list reaches well beyond today’s familiar contenders. Wanderers won it five times, as did Everton and West Bromwich Albion. Blackburn Rovers and Wanderers also achieved something different from Arsenal’s overall record: winning the cup in three consecutive years. Most titles and most consecutive titles are distinct measures of success. Arsenal lead the cumulative count, but that does not mean they own every record attached to the tournament.

Nor is the competition’s history exclusively English in terms of its winners. Cardiff City won in 1927, the only non-English club to have lifted the trophy in the supplied historical record. The final itself has travelled too. Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium hosted it from 2001 to 2006 while the new Wembley was being built, and the new Wembley has been its permanent home since 2007. Those changes of setting do not split the honours list into separate competitions: a victory in Cardiff counts towards the same FA Cup total as a victory at Wembley.

Finally, the 14-title answer refers specifically to the men’s FA Cup. The Women’s FA Cup is a separate competition, and League Cup or Community Shield victories do not belong in this tally either. The cleanest way to compare clubs is to count wins in this competition alone and attach a date to any historical table, because the totals can change with each final. For now, the essential answer remains straightforward: Arsenal lead with 14, Manchester United follow with 13, and another successful cup run could make that narrow gap disappear.