The Community Shield is usually played between the Premier League and FA Cup winners
Premier League champions Liverpool take on FA Cup winners Crystal Palace in the Community Shield – but would success at Wembley on Sunday indicate a successful season ahead?
Only one of the past 14 winners of the season opener have gone on to lift the Premier League trophy at the end of the campaign.
And what of the goalscorers?
BBC Sport crunches the numbers of recent Community or Charity Shields to see what we can learn.
Do Community Shield winners usually win the Premier League?
The answer to this question is surprisingly no.
In the Premier League era, only eight of the 33 winners of the Charity or Community Shield have gone on to win the title.
And five of those happened in a six-year spell from 2005 until 2010.
Manchester City, in 2019, were the last team to do so – and before that it was Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United in 2011.
In fact, since 1992 the teams who lose the Community Shield have won more league titles that season – 10 in total, including City for three years in a row between 2021 and 2023.
Last year City beat rivals Manchester United to win the curtain-raiser, but ended up having their worst season since 2016-17.
Some 45% of the time (15/33) the upcoming season’s Premier League winners had not been involved in the Community Shield.
And 55% of the time (18/33) the Shield winners have finished above the losers in the league that season.
On 10 occasions the two teams have finished as the top two in the Premier League – with four of those times being the Shield winners top and the losers as runners-up.
Do Premier League winners usually win Community Shield?
The other question is how many Community Shields are won by the previous season’s Premier League winners.
The answer is 18 out of 33 times – so 55%.
But a cause for optimism for Crystal Palace is that the FA Cup winners have won seven of the past 11 Shields, something that had only happened five times in the previous 22.
And on three occasions in the Premier League era, neither the league nor cup winners have won it.
Arsenal (1999 and 2023) and Manchester United (2010) qualified as Premier League runners-up and beat the Double winners in the game.
Do Community Shield goalscorers go on to have good seasons?
Cole Palmer’s breakthrough season came after his 2023 Community Shield goal – albeit for a different club
This one is a bit of a mixed bag.
In 2023 Cole Palmer netted for Manchester City in their game against Arsenal (a match they would go on to lose on penalties after Leandro Trossard’s injury-time equaliser).
He would go on to score 22 Premier League goals and be named young player of the season… for Chelsea, having joined them for £42.5m.
The previous season, Darwin Nunez scored on his Liverpool debut – and Erling Haaland failed to notch on his City bow.
That led to post-match discussion about Nunez looking the better player.
However, Haaland went on to 52 goals that season, with Nunez netting only 15.
Kelechi Iheanacho only scored four Premier League goals after his 2021 Community Shield winner.
But back in 2019 Raheem Sterling’s Shield strike for City against former club Liverpool kick-started the most productive season of his career (31 goals).
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