The Intrigue Behind The Community Shield

As reported by talkSPORT, Manchester City recently held their parade in order to celebrate all of the lovely trophies they’ve won this season. It was quite the campaign for Pep Guardiola’s men who managed to accumulate the domestic treble, which featured a Premier League trophy, the FA Cup trophy and the League Cup trophy. In short, that’s really really impressive, and they deserve to be praised a lot for that.

Of course, as reported by Manchester City themselves, they seem to be going with a different tagline for their trophies this past season: which includes a fourth trophy known as the Community Shield. This ‘competition’ of sorts has been running for a long old time now, and it only tends to feature two clubs. It either pits the Premier League champions against the FA Cup champions, or if the same club won both, it pits the 1^st & 2^nd teams in the Premier League against one another. It is usually the curtain raiser for the season and takes place a week or so prior to the Premier League getting back underway.

What is it?

A lot of fans just kind of tend to think of it as a friendly game though, that you happen to get a trophy for. Now we understand that City had to beat Chelsea in order to get the trophy, and Chelsea are quite good, but we tend to believe it isn’t that much of an achievement. The perseverance and squad rotation required for the aforementioned three competitions make their triumphs much more impressive, and we can’t quite stress that point enough. Manchester City are an incredible football team with an unbelievable squad, and they shouldn’t feel the need to include the Community Shield in order to make their season feel all the more impressive. After all, there’s a reason why the likes of Manchester United have been mocked in the past for parading it around.

This is pretty much a ‘non-issue’ because, understandably, a lot of fan are just choosing to focus on the fact that they’ve completed the domestic treble. That’s completely understandable but at the same time, we wanted to point this out in order to work out if there’s a general consensus about this kind of thing.

Heading back

Manchester City are going to be returning to Wembley in just a few short months in order to compete for the Community Shield once again, where they’ll face off against Liverpool. Perhaps their rivalry from last season’s Premier League title race will ensure more eyes gravitate towards this game, but when you consider the fact that Liverpool fans have a general apathy towards Wembley as a whole, we aren’t so sure it’s going to be a mutual feeling of ‘oh yay, let’s try and win the Community Shield with everything we’ve got, guys’.

Pessimism isn’t a fun trait to possess and we realise that we’re showcasing that pretty disgustingly right now, so what we will say is this: we could only dream of accomplishing what City have, and we understand how meaningless our opinions are by comparison. Enjoy!