The competition is a
knockout tournament with pairings drawn at random - like the
FA Cup there is a minimal form of seeding, in that members of the (higher-level)
Conference National enter together at a later stage in the tournament, and the draw for each round takes place after the completion of the round before.
Assuming the Conference is neither expanded nor diminished in future, there will thus be an annual entry of 68 teams into the tournament.
The first three rounds are contested solely between teams from the Conference's
North and
South divisions, however, until only 8 teams total from the two Divisions remain, at which point the teams of the Conference National will be entered.
Matches which produce no winner after 90 minutes continue into extra time and then progress to a
penalty shoot-out akin to the style of the
Football League Cup, rather than scheduling replays as in the FA Cup.
The first round is scheduled for October, with the intention that teams are unlikely to find themselves contesting the Conference League Cup at the same time as they play in the FA Cup and to a lesser extent, the
FA Trophy, thus reducing the workload of even the more successful teams.
As an added incentive to attract greater crowds and more interest and commitment, the Football Conference announced that it has arranged a deal with
Setanta Sports, the competition's sponsor, to provide live television coverage of the latter stages of the competition, thus generating much-needed revenue as well as interest from non-Conference sources.
