They did it twice last season alone — beating Arsenal 2-0 in March’s Carabao Cup final, Nico O’Reilly scoring both goals, and then edging past Chelsea 1-0 in the FA Cup final in May, Antoine Semenyo’s backheeled flick settling that one. For ten years, whenever Manchester City turned up at Wembley for a domestic final, the script barely changed. Pep Guardiola would talk down the occasion beforehand, and then, more often than not, City would win it. Both wins came under the arch, amid the smoke and noise that City’s players had grown almost used to.
Key Factors
Guardiola is gone, replaced by Enzo Maresca after his decade at the Etihad ended, and Wembley itself is unavailable — The Weeknd is playing there both Saturday and Sunday, so the FA have shifted the 2026 Community Shield to the Principality Stadium in Cardiff, the first time the fixture has been staged there since 2006. Twice in the recent past, City did exactly that — most starkly in 2023-24, when Guardiola’s side pipped Arsenal to the league by two agonising points.
Arsenal finished runners-up three seasons running, in 2022-23, 2023-24, and again in 2024-25, and the “nearly men” tag stuck hard enough that even City beating them 2-1 in April, deep into last season’s run-in, felt like business as usual. None of that applies to Sunday’s Community Shield. City, then, arrive at a ground with no history of trophies for them, under a manager with no competitive matches for them, missing the midfielder who has anchored almost everything they’ve done for six years. Arsenal represent a different problem entirely, and a familiar one. This is not the Arsenal that City spent years brushing aside in title races. It was the sort of result that, in previous years, would have been the moment Arsenal’s challenge quietly folded.
