From Milk to Carabao: A Definitive Ranking of the League Cup's Sponsored Names

It's Carabao Cup final weekend. The burning question everyone's asking: will Manchester City finally end their silverware drought dating back to 2024, or will Mikel Arteta's Arsenal side—with their lethal set-piece prowess—edge closer to domestic quad immortality?

Frankly, we're not losing sleep over it. But what does keep us awake at night? The absolutely dreadful name slapped across the competition. Which raises an altogether more pressing question: of all the monikers this trophy has carried over the decades, which one actually deserves a place in the pantheon of great League Cup names?

10) EFL Cup (2016/17)

There's something oddly endearing about Jose Mourinho claiming the only EFL Cup ever won. He's Special, apparently. Your Guardiolas and Artetas can't say that.

Here's the rub though: sponsorless iterations of the League Cup are inherently inferior, and EFL Cup ranks worse than Football League Cup for two reasons. First, it's a factually dubious title—22 per cent of competitors (and frankly, all the probable winners) don't actually play in the EFL. Second, EFL simply sounds worse than Football League. It conjures images of a right-wing splinter party formed by blokes who reckon Reform, Restore, and Re-whatever have all gone soft. Who dreams of winning a cup bearing that name? Apparently Mourinho.

9) Football League Cup (1960/61-1980/81)

The original architects clearly fancied themselves as traditionalists, channelling the venerable FA Cup with something straightforward and elegant. Except nobody—and we mean nobody—actually called it the Football League Cup. Everyone just said League Cup, didn't they?

It's also rubbish because the opening word's redundant and the final two words contradict themselves. Is it a league or a cup, this bewildering entity that would eventually become an administrative migraine for mid-table Premier League bosses? At least sponsors arrived well before 1992, sparing it from becoming as factually inaccurate as the EFL Cup incarnation.

8) Capital One Cup (2012/13-2015/16)

What on earth is a Capital One? We don't know, and frankly we don't want to know. This sounds nothing like a football competition and everything like a one-day county cricket knockabout or—worse still—some rugby tournament. Dreadful.

7) Carabao Cup (2017/18 onwards)

As a fully grown adult who still can't stomach hot beverages (barring the glorious terrace staple Bovril, naturally), the energy drink explosion has been rather handy. Just because someone's retained their childhood palate doesn't mean they shouldn't be pumped full of caffeine daily. Energy drinks taste uniformly ghastly—that's the point—but you've got to respect Carabao's brazen commitment to making their low-rent Red Bull knockoff taste actively, provocatively vile.

What flavour their "Original" is supposed to be remains one of life's great mysteries. The rest are named after wholesome fruits they taste absolutely nothing like. Genuinely revolting stuff. While it continues the recent tradition of alliteration in naming everyone's third-favourite English football trophy, it's still a rubbish moniker.

Our primary complaint? Far too many people call it the Caribou Cup. That's actually a better name, which somehow makes the whole debacle worse.

6) Carling Cup (2003/04-2011/12)

Another unpalatable fizzy drink, though at least this one's harder to misspell—which bumps it up a rung. The longest-serving pre-Carabao sponsor yet somehow the most forgettable. Appropriate, really.

5) Rumbelows Cup (1990/91-1991/92)

An electrical retailer boasting 285 UK stores at its peak, yet apparently never managed to turn a profit across its entire 24-year existence. If a two-year League Cup sponsorship couldn't reverse their fortunes, nothing could. Three years later, Rumbelows had vanished.

Despite their fleeting tenure, they left their mark. The name tripped off the tongue pleasantly enough, but more significantly, they restored the original three-handled League Cup trophy from the competition's opening two decades—and it's been used ever since. Whether this represented genuine reverence for tradition or simply reflected their inability to afford a custom trophy is anyone's guess.

4) Worthington Cup (1998/99-2002/03)

Too heavily associated with rugby union and league, but a solid, properly English sponsor nonetheless. Barely 25 years have passed since their Leicester-based reign ended, yet it already feels like ancient history.

It's somehow more wholesome than the sponsorless alternatives—we can't really explain why. We've developed a genuine soft spot for the Worthington and wouldn't mind resurrecting that name.

3) Coca-Cola Cup (1992/93-1997/98)

With respect to everything else on this list, there's something genuinely incongruous about a genuine global megabrand rubbing shoulders with the rest of this lot. Drably corporate? Absolutely. But also undoubtedly the most satisfying to articulate among the alliterative offerings.

2) Littlewoods Challenge Cup (1986/87-1989/90)

Everyone develops an irrational attachment to whatever was popular when they first discovered something—the music released when you were seventeen, the football shirts from your childhood, that sort of thing. There's a corner of the League Cup that will forever belong to Littlewoods.

The pools carry grand traditions in English football, of course. Here's a confession: as a daft child, when the pools panel results appeared in the classifieds, I genuinely believed a group of lads got to decide official match outcomes for games that hadn't actually happened. Seven-year-old me was absolutely furious about this perceived injustice. Surely everyone should be outraged? Turns out not.

One quibble: what's with the "Challenge" bit? What's that doing there?

1) Milk Cup (1981/82-1985/86)

Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. That English football's maiden voyage into sponsorship should be underwritten by milk—just generic milk—remains genuinely inspired.

Does milk really require the profile boost and awareness-raising that such a partnership provides? We're fairly confident more people know about milk than know about the League Cup. Had this sponsorship never happened, Viz magazine would've had to invent it.

The Milk Cup! Milk! A Cup! Sponsored by Milk! It's properly mental.

The only saving grace is the absurdity of it all, because Milk's decision to introduce their own trophy—and criminally, making it non-functional as an actual drinking vessel—is an outrage. A cup must be drinkable; it's foundational. The audacity of Big Milk presuming they can disregard centuries of what constitutes a cup is appalling. If anyone should understand drink receptacles, surely it's the milk industry.

Still, brilliant name regardless. And it's still what your old man calls it, which you always assumed was an affectation designed specifically to wind you up. Then you realised the Barclays hasn't been the Barclays since 2016, and you've become him. You're old now. The grave awaits.