Arsenal's meeting with Manchester City this August will be the latest instalment of a fixture stretching back more than a century, when Manchester United and Queens Park Rangers contested the very first edition in 1908.
Few fixtures in English football can trace their roots back that far while still holding genuine relevance today. Anyone checking the Community Shield odds for this year's match is looking at a fixture with more history behind it than almost any other in English football.
The competition has changed considerably since those early years, from its charitable origins through to its current status as the traditional curtain-raiser to the Premier League season. Here's a look at where it all began, where it has been played, who has dominated it, and why it still matters every August.
The Charity Shield, as it was originally known, evolved from the Sheriff of London Charity Shield, a match traditionally played between a leading amateur side and a leading professional club.
The first edition in 1908 pitted Football League champions Manchester United against Southern League champions Queens Park Rangers, ending 1-1 before United won a replay 4-0, the only occasion the fixture has ever needed a second match.
The competition was renamed the Community Shield in 2002 to better reflect its focus on charitable and community causes.
For much of its early history, the match moved between various club grounds, often involving teams that hadn't won anything that season. That changed in 1974, when the FA proposed staging the fixture at Wembley Stadium as a proper curtain-raiser to the new campaign.
Since then, all but a handful of editions have been played there, with brief spells at Cardiff's Millennium Stadium between 2001 and 2006 while Wembley was being rebuilt, plus one-off stagings at Villa Park in 2012 and the King Power Stadium in 2022.
No club has enjoyed more success in the fixture than Manchester United, who have won the Shield 21 times, including four shared titles, from 31 appearances overall, comfortably the most of any club to have taken part.
Liverpool and Arsenal make up the rest of the podium with 16 and 17 wins respectively. For those tracking football betting markets around this fixture, United's dominant record makes them the benchmark by which every modern winner is judged.
The highest scoring match in the competition's history came in 1911, when Manchester United beat Swindon Town 8-4, with Harold Halse scoring six goals in a single game, a record that still stands.
More recently, Arsenal's 2004 win over Manchester United drew a crowd of over 63,000 to the Millennium Stadium, a reminder of how much the fixture had grown from its amateur origins.
Some dismiss the Shield as a glorified friendly, but it remains the first competitive fixture of the English football calendar and a genuine chance for supporters to see their side before the season proper begins.
It also offers managers a first look at new signings and tactical set-ups under real match pressure, which is exactly why clubs still take it seriously more than a century after that first meeting between United and QPR.
