It doesn't matter - apart from when it does

The Community Shield is a friendly that rarely tells anybody anything – other than those rare occasions when it suddenly exposes truths nobody had suspected

Saturday was the tenth anniversary of the 2015 Community Shield, in which Arsenal beat Chelsea 1-0. The Community Shield is always a slightly strange occasion. Managers love to include it in their list of successes and, particularly in odd-numbered years when there’s been no major men’s international tournament, there’s always a sense of relief when it comes round because it means football is starting again, but everybody knows that Community Shields essentially mean nothing.

Except that sometimes they do.

This puts journalists in a strange position. There you are, at a showpiece event at Wembley, the eyes of the (English) footballing world upon it, and you have to analyse and deconstruct and see patterns and come up with theories and meanings. You have to take a game that almost certainly means nothing and fill a 900-word space, explain how new signings fit or don’t fit, divine the future. Some are weary from tours, some have transfer business still to complete. Some sides take the game desperately seriously; for some it’s just another part of pre-season. You dress it all in caveats, point out sides are at different stages of pre-season and preparedness, and hope nobody is keeping the receipts.

But still, you often end up writing nonsense. Based on his goal in a 2-1 defeat against Liverpool, you find yourself suggesting that Andriy Shevchenko will somehow make Chelsea even better, even when a large part of you suspects he will be a needless complication. After his second-half display in 2011, you find yourself hailing Tom Cleverley as the midfielder England have been crying out for. On the back of a defeat to Arsenal in 2023 you kid yourself that Manchester City have lost their edge, even though they lost the previous two Shields as well.

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My history of the World Cup, The Power and the Glory, is out in September. Order here. Or, for those who dislike Amazon, here. Or for those who order on July 31 and want 25% off, here.

On It Was What It Was, the football history podcast, we look at how Crvena Zvezda (Red Star Belgrade) won the European Cup in 1991 as Yugoslavia collapsed around them. Listen here.

On Libero, we consider England’s Euro 2025 win and ask what’s going on wth Alexander Isak. Listen here.

Issue 57 of The Blizzard is out now, featuring Ivica Osim and the death of Yugoslavia, football in Cornwall, how punk was shaped by terrace chants, the development of the Bhutanese league and the Liverpool striker who lost a leg and became a stunt diver. Buy here. And, ever wanted the history of football tactics explained in one gorgeous poster? Or the Premier League as Fibonacci sequence? Then you’re in luck. Buy here.

A new project with Tifo: an animation charting the entire history of football. Episode Two is here.

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Sometimes, though, something happens in the Community Shield that sets the tone for everything to follow. Sunday’s Community Shield between Liverpool and Crystal Palace, for instance, falls 51 years to the day since the scrap between Kevin Keegan and Billy Bremner in the 1974 Charity Shield (for more on that, listen to this episode of It Was What It Was), which now stands as one of the great set-pieces in the story of Brian Clough’s 44 days at Leeds.

What happed in 2015, though, while far less dramatic, was perhaps even more consequential. José Mourinho turned up looking unusually unkempt, wearing a sloppy tracksuit, unshaved, his hair unusually long and uncombed. This was a manager who was as keenly aware of the importance of image as any, whose good looks and sharp dress sense had been a huge part of his early shtick. So why turn up at Wembley looking like he’d just popped out from doing up the bathroom to buy some more paint at B&Q? Was he somehow trying to say that he wasn’t bothered, that this game didn’t matter? Was it some sort of pre-emptive effort to down-play the significance of what turned out to be his first ever defeat to Arsène Wenger?

What followed, of course, was one of the most remarkable collapses in Premier League history. The following weekend, with Chelsea down to ten men after the dismissal of Petr Čech and drawing 2-2 at home to Fulham, Eden Hazard went down in injury-time, clutching his groin. The referee Michael Oliver signalled to Chelsea’s medical staff. They didn’t respond immediately, and so he nodded at them. On ran the physio Jon Fearn, closely followed by the team doctor, Eva Carneiro. A photograph taken from beside the goal shows Mourinho’s reaction as she ran past him, his right arm flying up, his face crumpling into anger.

As the pair left the pitch having attended to Hazard, Mourinho exchanged furious words with both. He subsequently described them as “naïve” because Hazard, having received treatment, had to leave the field reducing Chelsea temporarily to nine men. But what else, realistically, should they have done? Carneiro and Fearn were subsequently demoted from working with the first team. Carneiro sued for constructive dismissal and eventually reached an out-of-court settlement for a reported £5million.

It was a bizarre, needless spat. Initially the assumption had been that Mourinho, as he had so often before, was creating an incident to deflect from a poor performance. Perhaps he was, but the anger seemed genuine. Why carry on the issue to the point it cost the club money? This was Mourinho at his unacceptable worst, pursuing his own ends to the point it made a significant negative impact on others.

But it also perhaps suggested the turmoil in his own mind. Chelsea lost none of their first 16 league games of that season. Mourinho was sacked after a 2-1 defeat at Leicester on December 14. And because a big club in crisis is the most entertaining thing in football, those four months were mesmerising. I was in Lalibela in Ethiopia when Chelsea lost at home to Liverpool at the end of October and the huge video-halls there were packed just to see Mourinho’s post-match press-conference. It was a soap opera that enthralled the world.

And the first hint of it came when Mourinho emerged from the Wembley tunnel looking scruffy. The semiotics of what managers where is a topic to which I’ll soon return, but the broader issue is the Community Shield.

Most of the time it’s a game that doesn’t matter at all, but there are occasions when it offers a great shaft on insight or serves as the prologue to hugely significant events.