At least this year, these side competitions have achieved slightly greater prominence through now being separately listed on our main account pages, in the left sidebar, underneath our placings in all our leagues (if you can be bothered to scroll all the way down...); whereas, in the past, you had to find a tab to switch views from 'League' to 'Cup' and it was easily missed, and most people probably never had any inkling it was there, or that these competitions existed.
But the FPL Gnomes still seem to be saying NOTHING about the cup competitions in their regular burps of publicity material....
It turns out that the global Cup is kicking off this week! Who knew???
Gosh, yes, there are 2^24 registered users this year!! Well, not quite: 4 million or so managers will be getting a bye in the opening round.
In most previous years, I have failed to pay any attention to the global Cup - not realising when it had started! - until long after I'd been eliminated from it.
And I would generally counsel against paying too much attention to it, as obsessing about head-to-head results is detrimental to your long-term goal of getting the best possible points total for the season.
However, Cup competitions in the smaller mini-leagues are a nice little side-event that can provide a lot of fun in the game - and, sometimes, a lot of consolation for disappointing overall performance. (You can luck into a good cup run even if you're doing pretty terribly in points and league rankings!)
So, pay attention to when your mini-league Cups are due to start. (It takes just a little bit of maths to work it out. Check the size of your league, find the nearest higher figure in this 'powers of 2' table [unless it's an exact match, there will need to be a preliminary round - with some players getting a 'bye' - to whittle the number down to nearest power of 2; the number of competitors being halved in each round], and then subtract the number of that power from the number of gameweeks in the season [38] and add 1 to find the number of the starting gameweek.)
And have some FUN with them!!!
