The doubt for anyone when a long-strived-for goal has been achieved is hunger. Arsenal waited 22 years for their 14th league title and, compounding the yearning, finished second three times in a row before finally lifting the Premier League trophy in May. The physical exertions of last season were immense – as seen by Declan Rice’s clear exhaustion and Bukayo Saka’s intermittent contributions at the World Cup, where William Saliba picked up a back injury – but so too was the emotional strain.
The first weeks of a new season after a major tournament, especially the World Cup, are often a little erratic anyway, but this feels like a particularly unpredictable start to a campaign. Nine of the 20 Premier League clubs have changed manager this summer. For the first time in 40 years, none of the five big managerial beasts of the Premier League era – Sir Alex Ferguson, Arsène Wenger, José Mourinho, Jürgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola – will be in charge of a club.
There are unknowns and uncertainty everywhere, even at Arsenal. Mikel Arteta may be the longest-serving manager in the league but there are questions even there; it would be no great surprise if Arsenal were to start slowly. Manchester City are at the other end of the scale, after two seasons that were disappointing by their extremely elevated recent standards, and with a new manager after a decade under Guardiola.
Enzo Maresca may look like his predecessor and his football may look like a version of his predecessor’s – notably from that period when he was his assistant manager – but he arrives at City surrounded by questions. He led Leicester to promotion and won the Europa Conference League and Club World Cup with Chelsea, but fans of those clubs seemed unconvinced by the style of play. And while Chelsea clearly had problems with the balance of their squad, and got dramatically worse after he left, it wasn’t entirely clear he was making the best of the resources he had.
The Community Shield is a first opportunity to make some kind of assessment of whether Arsenal’s hunger is as sharp as it was last season, and of how City’s squad are adapting to their new manager. It is, though, a largely ceremonial occasion, any lessons drawn to be taken with extreme caution. Not since 2018 have the winners of the Community Shield gone on to win the Premier League; in that sense, it’s a sort of anti-bellwether.
Where it can give indicators as to the season ahead tends to be less in showcasing the strengths of a potential champion than in exposing the flaws that might bring a side low. This year is unlikely to bring a repeat of 1974, when the scrap between Kevin Keegan and Billy Bremner exposed both the Liverpool forward’s unease at the retirement of Bill Shankly and, more consequentially, the general loss of morale at Leeds after Brian Clough had succeeded Don Revie. Often the significance of the Community Shield is properly recognised only in retrospect.
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