With Euro 2024 over and teams beginning to fly out on their lucrative pre-season tours, it means that the start of the 2024/25 season is rapidly approaching.
While there’s still plenty of transfers to be boxed off and an Olympic tournament to be played before the start of the new domestic season, teams are now looking ahead to a new campaign that is full of promise.
And that also means that English football’s traditional curtain raiser is almost here. FourFourTwo takes a look at this season’s FA Community Shield.
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This year’s Community Shield will be the 102nd edition of the competition, which has taken on a number of different names over the past century or so.
It was first placed in 1908, having evolved from the Sheriff of London Charity Shield that was devised in 1898 and was a professionals versus amateurs competition, before amateur clubs fell out with the FA.
The new format saw the Football League First Division champions play the Southern League champions and after a few variations, it settled on its present format in 1930, which put the Football League champions up against the winners of the FA Cup.
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Leicester City won the Community Shield in 2021
It moved to Wembley Stadium in 1974 and when the Premier League was established in 1992, it then became the Premier League champions against the FA Cup winners.
Should a team win a Premier League and the FA Cup double, they will face the runners-up from the Premier League.
The name of the contest changed in 2002 from the Charity Shield to the Community Shield, after the Charity Commission found that the FA did not meet its legal obligations under charity law to specify how much money went to charity and delaying payments to the nominated charities.
This year’s contest which takes place on Saturday, August 10 at Wembley Stadium, will be a local derby as Manchester City take on Manchester United.
City won their fourth consecutive Premier League title on the final day of last season and were favourites to do the double, only for their cross-town rivals United to upset them in the FA Cup final following a disappointing league campaign that saw them finish in eighth place. Had City won the FA Cup, Arsenal would be playing in the Community Shield, as they finished second in the league.
This will be the fourth year in a row City will play in the match, with Pep Guardiola’s men having lost the last three contests. Should the Red Devils win, it will be their 22nd victory in the match, extending their own record for most wins in the competition’s history.
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