By Mark Baber
August 3 – The victory of Paris St Germain in the Trophee des Champions has been greeted by predictable headlines regarding the club’s dominance of French soccer, but statistical analysis shows that behind Arsenal’s victory over Chelsea on Sunday lies an historically significant stranglehold on the Community Shield by a small group of England’s top clubs.
Both the Community Shield (previously known as the Charity Shield) and the Trophee des Champions are played (with a few notable exceptions) between the winner of the top flight league and the winner of the premier cup competition in each country. Where a club has won and FA Cup/ League double they usually play the club placed in second place in the League. Which clubs participate in the two competitions is therefore a good measure of dominance in the respective leagues. The table of results from the last 20 years of the Community Shield shows a significant dominance by a small number of clubs:
As we can see, only eight clubs have competed in the Community Shield over the last 20 years.
It is also worth noting that, from the table of winners by how they qualified for the game, although the top team in the League might be expected to dominate the competition (as they do in France where the Ligue 1 winner has won 13 of the last 16 editions), this is not in fact so in England:
By way of comparison, the table of teams playing in the Charity Shield in the 20 years prior to the formation of the Premier League shows a far larger number of teams involved in the Cup:
Although this era was a time of relative dominance by Liverpool, even they only participated in 32.5% of finals compared to Manchester United’s 35% in recent times, and no other team participated in over 10% of finals, whilst in the last 20 years every single final has included either Manchester United, Chelsea or Arsenal.
Although French football has seen periods of dominance by Lyon and now Paris St Germain, the Trophee des Champions has actually been open to a greater number of sides than the Community Shield as can be seen from the below table including the 20 most recent editions (in 1996 it was not played due to Auxerre winning the double):
The data from the Community Shield therefore dovetails with other research which suggests an increasingly sclerotic hierarchy in football, particularly in England, with less social mobility and an established elite of clubs who dominate competition to the detriment of smaller clubs and their fans.
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