Community Shield history gives Arsenal and City little league certainty

Only eight of the 34 Community Shield winners since the Premier League began in 1992-93 have gone on to win the title. Just one of the past 15 Shield winners achieved that league double, making Sunday’s meeting between Arsenal and Manchester City a poor guide to the season ahead.

Arsenal, the reigning English champions, face City at Cardiff’s Principality Stadium after City finished second in the Premier League and won the FA Cup. The fixture therefore brings together the two clubs who occupied the top two places in the previous league campaign, but history does not strongly favour the team lifting the Shield.

The losing side has produced more subsequent champions in the Premier League era, with 10 such cases. Manchester City were runners-up in the Shield before winning the league in each of the three seasons from 2021 to 2023. In total, the Shield winners have finished above the losers in 18 of the 34 seasons, while the two clubs have ended the campaign as the top two on 10 occasions.

The previous season offered another warning against reading too much into the result. Crystal Palace defeated Liverpool in the 2025 Shield, yet Palace finished 15th in the league and Liverpool ended fifth. Palace did win the Conference League, while neither team secured the domestic outcome suggested by the Wembley-style curtain-raiser.

The eventual Premier League champions were not involved in the Shield in 16 of the 34 seasons. That included Arsenal in 2025-26. The FA Cup winners have also gained the upper hand more often recently, winning eight of the last 12 editions compared with five in the previous 22.

Individual performances have been just as unreliable as team results. Darwin Nunez scored on his Liverpool debut in the 2022 Shield, while Erling Haaland failed to score for Manchester City, but Haaland finished that season with 52 goals to Nunez’s 15. Kelechi Iheanacho followed his 2021 winning goal with four Premier League goals, whereas Raheem Sterling’s 2019 strike preceded the most productive season of his career, when he scored 31 times.