Marc Guehi is on the brink of a rare FA Cup double that has taken him from the high of captaining Crystal Palace to the first major trophy in the club’s 120-year history to the oddity of being knocked out of the competition and then returning in another shirt. On Saturday, he is set to start Manchester City’s fourth consecutive FA Cup final.
The 24-year-old defender’s route has been anything but ordinary. In January, Palace were beaten by sixth-tier Macclesfield, 117 places below them in the football pyramid, and nine days later Guehi joined Manchester City. That twist was made possible by a rule change allowing players eliminated from the FA Cup with one club to turn out for another, a quirk that has left him standing on the edge of another final after one of the strangest stretches of his career.
Guehi put it bluntly when he reflected on the spell: “I feel like my football life is just crazy. There’s no consistency to it. It’s just very unpredictable. And it’s quite fun.”
That unpredictability has made him part of one of the competition’s more unusual modern stories. He left Palace as the most decorated captain in the club’s history, and he did so with his contract due to expire this summer. Days after the Macclesfield defeat, he said he owed Palace supporters “at least for their voices to be heard” because they were such a big part of football, adding that “in that moment, it was low for them, but that’s just another part of life, I guess.”
For Palace, the journey with Guehi ended in triumph. He captained them to the first major trophy in their 120-year history, a landmark that gave his spell at Selhurst Park its defining image. For City, it has been a run to another final in a competition where he now finds himself back in familiar surroundings, even if the route there has been anything but familiar.
There is also a broader context to the run. The FA Cup rule change has created rare scenarios like this one, where a player can be out of the competition with one club and still return with another. Guehi’s case has drawn extra attention because it sits between two extremes: the joy of a first major Palace trophy and the embarrassment of a January exit to Macclesfield, a result that felt impossible on paper before the game was played.
Guehi has described the competition’s pull in plain terms. “I know how much it means to them to win trophies, especially FA Cup and the history that it has behind and also the record breaking, getting to this part of the competition again,” he said, with the focus now on a final in which Manchester City lost the 2025 FA Cup final and he still came away with a gold medal from the occasion. Few careers swing between highs and lows inside the same tournament quite like his has, and that is why his path has become so hard to ignore.
The comparison point is a small one, but a revealing one: Brian Talbot and Olivier Giroud are the other players mentioned as having won consecutive FA Cup finals for different clubs. Guehi is now on the brink of joining that company, even if his route to the final has been stranger than anything a standard cup run could produce. For readers tracking the broader arc, his path is also set out in Kolo Toure and Marc Guéhi's wild 12 months from Palace glory to City pressure and Marc Guehi’s wild FA Cup path carries him into another final with Manchester City.
