How important is the Community Shield to a team's season?
English champions Arsenal will face FA Cup winners and runners-up Manchester City at Cardiff's Principality Stadium on Sunday in the Community Shield, prompting a look at whether the traditional curtain-raiser predicts success in the coming league campaign.
Dean Henderson's penalty-shootout heroics helped Crystal Palace win the 2025 Community Shield. Since the Premier League began in 1992-93, only eight of the 34 winners of the Charity or Community Shield have gone on to win the league, five of those occurring in a six-year span from 2005 until 2010; Manchester City in 2019 were the last to do so and, before that, it was Alex Ferguson's Manchester United in 2011. Only one of the past 15 Shield winners has become league champion in the same season.
Across the Premier League era, the team that lost the Community Shield has gone on to win the league more frequently than the Shield winner, doing so on 10 occasions. That tally includes Manchester City winning the league in three consecutive seasons between 2021 and 2023.
Crystal Palace's 2025 victory over Liverpool did not translate into a high domestic finish the following season: Palace ended up 15th in the league but went on to win the Conference League, while Liverpool finished fifth.
Almost half the time — 47% (16/34) — the eventual Premier League champions for the upcoming season were not involved in the Community Shield, a pattern that applied to Arsenal in 2025-26. Shield winners have finished above the losers in the league in 53% of seasons (18/34), and on 10 occasions the two Community Shield participants have finished as the top two in the Premier League, with four of those seasons seeing the Shield winner finish first and the loser second.
Previous-season Premier League winners have claimed the Community Shield 18 times out of 34 (53%). Including Crystal Palace, FA Cup winners have taken eight of the past 12 Shields, compared with five occurrences in the preceding 22; on three occasions in the Premier League era neither the league nor FA Cup winners prevailed in the Shield — Arsenal did so in 1999 and 2023, and Manchester United in 2010, when each qualified as Premier League runners-up and beat the Double winners.
Goalscorers in the Shield have had mixed follow-ups: Crystal Palace's 2025 scorers Jean-Philippe Mateta and Ismaila Sarr combined for 37 goals the prior season. Hugo Ekitike scored his first of 17 goals in his debut season for Liverpool, while Jeremie Frimpong did not enjoy a strong first campaign after netting. In 2023 Cole Palmer scored for Manchester City against Arsenal — a match City lost on penalties after Leandro Trossard's injury-time equaliser — and Palmer subsequently scored 22 Premier League goals and was named young player of the season for Chelsea after joining them for £42.5m. Darwin Nunez scored on his Liverpool debut and Erling Haaland failed to score on his City bow; Haaland finished that season with 52 goals and Nunez with 15. Kelechi Iheanacho scored four Premier League goals after his 2021 Community Shield winner, and Raheem Sterling's 2019 Shield strike for City against former club Liverpool preceded his most productive season of 31 goals.
The Community Shield between Arsenal and Manchester City takes place at Cardiff's Principality Stadium on Sunday. A version of this article first appeared before the 2025 Community Shield.
