Community Shield has an identity crisis
THE trouble with the Community Shield is that it doesn’t know what it wants to be.
On the one hand, it’s a sort of Super Cup, a serious set-to which decides which of the holders of the two most-prestigious trophies in English football is the better team.
The winners get to lay down a marker for the new season and parade around Wembley with another piece of silverware.
On the other hand, it’s a pre-season friendly which still partially fulfils its original function to raise money for good causes.
This year the FA, Chelsea and Arsenal are hoping to raise in the region of £1.25m for the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire.
The match hasn’t been known as the Charity Shield since 2002 but, despite the name change, revenue continues to be distributed to the 124 clubs who compete in the FA Cup from the first round onwards – for distribution to charities and projects of their choice – and to the FA’s national charity partners. That has to be applauded. Yet if you ask Jose Mourinho how many trophies he won last season he will tell you it was three – the Europa League, the EFL Cup and the Community Shield.
He counts the Shield as a trophy because it strengthens his CV and this afternoon Antonio Conte and Arsene Wenger will espouse the same message: “It’s a massive game, a London derby, a chance to win silverware”.
Conte is new to English football and might actually mean what he says. But Wenger has won six of these things and he’ll know that what happens at Wembley today has little relevance in football terms.
Managers can talk it up all they like. But the days of Kevin Keegan and Billy Bremner scrapping in the 1974 version, tearing off their shirts and getting 11-game bans because the result mattered so much are long gone.
The Community Shield is now only important to the clubs as another step in their preparation for the coming season.
In fact, from a commercial point of view, the game the two have already played against each other in Beijing was much more significant.
That one at least sold lots of new shirts, bumped up potential TV revenue and added countless followers to the clubs’ social media accounts.
It won’t matter if Arsenal repeat their FA Cup Final victory over Chelsea this afternoon, or if the Blues get their revenge.
It’s time to stop pretending it does.