Can anyone explain to me why wales team Cardiff city plays in the English league?? Because they are in the FA Cup final and if they win they might be able to play in the European competitions http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/teams/c/cardiff_city/7350681.stm
Mainly because they've always played in the English league system - they've been members of the Football League since 1920, and were in the Southern League before that. They are notable, of course, for having previously won the FA Cup in 1927, and some of the ceremonial planned for this year's final, such as the playing of the Welsh National Anthem as well as God Save the Queen, is because it was previously done in 1927. Fundamentally this business of Welsh clubs playing in English leagues/competitions (and vice versa - until the early 1990s there was nothing unusual in an English team winning the Welsh Cup) is a mixture of history and geography. Back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there were no inhibitions about playing over the border, and the geography of Wales has always meant that it's easier to travel east-west than north-south, so it was natural for teams to play their English neighbours. There wasn't even a Welsh national football league until the early 1990s.
The main reason is because it's the Football League, not the English league. When the Southern League was swallowed up by the FL in 1920, the idea was to expand the league into Wales and allow Welsh teams to enter. East/West transport links in Wales were (and still are) much better than the North/South links, and there weren't enough top class teams in Wales to really make a national league viable. As has been said before, we didn't even have a national league until 1992 - Swansea, Cardiff, Newport & Wrexham were football league clubs, Merthyr in the confernece, while many others competed in the Northern Premier League - Rhyl, Caernarfon, Bangor, Welshpool and Newtown have all played in it, and yet more in the Southern, Bridgend and Barry spring to mind. Joining it now would cripple both Swansea and Cardiff, while Newport and Colwyn Bay, who also play in the English system, have fought against a decision to make them join in court.
