Match of the Past: 1983-84 - Evolution, not revolution

This week sees the start of the weekly Match of the Past series for paying subscribers, and this season we’re going into detail with a blow-by-blow account of the 1983-84 Football League season. And we kick off with the annual match which straddles the exact dividing line between a cup final and a pre-season friendly, the Charity Shield.

If ever you wanted to peer inside the id of professional football in England, the Charity Shield is as good a place to start as any. When it was established as the Sheriff of London’s Charity Shield at the end of the 19th century, it was intended to be an annual showcase match between the best of the professional game and the best of the - then still burgeoning - amateur game.

But by the time it took the form that starts to look vaguely familiar to us today, relations between the amateurs and the professionals had deteriorated to such an extent that the amateurs had been replaced by the winners of the professional Southern League. The amateurs did eventually return - in 1927, for example, FA Cup holders Cardiff City beat Corinthian 2-1 - but by 1930 the format that we still know today, the League champions versus the FA Cup holders, had permanently crystallised.

There have been further anomalies since then. After Spurs did the double in 1961, they played a FA representative XI (and won 3-2). A decade later, when Arsenal did the same, they turned down the opportunity to play in it at all, Second Division champions Leicester City played Cup runners-up Liverpool and beat them 1-0 to become that rarest of creatures, a club which won the Charity Shield without having win either the FA Cup or the League. They’ve managed both since, of course.

The match was moved to Wembley in 1974 - an appropriate tribute to Kevin Keegan could be achieved by Martin Odegaard and Tijjani Reijnders getting into a fight and both getting sent off - and in 1993 its tradition of ending with the Shield itself being shared in the event of a draw - they had tried out a penalty shootout in 1974 but decided not to proceed with it every year - ended, with the decision made to determine winners through penalty shootouts being made permanent.

In 2002, in a moment which should have shamed football in this country far more than it did occurred, when the Charity Commission determined that the FA weren’t doing enough for charity, and required the name of the match to be changed to the Community Shield. It’s been that way for 24 years now, though there will be one change in 2026, with the match having been moved to Cardiff because Wembley is double-booked, which feels in some way very much in keeping with the tradition of this match.

So, is the Community Shield a competitive match, a major trophy or a friendly? Most commonly these days, it’s described as a “curtain-raiser” for the season, which skilfully sidesteps how seriously the match should actually be taken. It didn’t feel very serious in 1974, when the match was ultimately decided when the Leeds goalkeeper blasted a penalty both high and wide in the shootout, though Billy Bremner and Kevin Keegan may have disagreed this assessment.

Perhaps the best way to consider it in terms of a piece of silverware is “still counts.” Liverpool include their 16 of them on the honours page of their website, as do Manchester United. But you can’t force footballers and managers to take a match of this nature seriously, so the tone of the match still tends to fall halfway between being a competitive match and a friendly. This feels appropriate, as a way of ushering in a new season. Everybody in football loves a piece of silverware, but they also know that losing this match will usually be forgotten within a couple of weeks of it having taken place.