Arsenal vs Man City LIVE: Community Shield result, final score and reaction as Gunners win on penalties

And Arsenal’s team for Wembley includes three new signings: Kai Havertz, Declan Rice and Jurrien Timber.

ARS XI: Ramsdale, White, Saliba, Gabriel, Timber, Partey, Rice, Odegaard, Saka, Havertz, Martinelli.

Man City XI confirmed: Kyle Walker captains the team while both Erling Haaland and Julian Alvarez start up front.

MCI: Ortega Moreno, Walker (C), Stones, Dias, Akanji, Rodrigo, Kovacic, Bernardo, Grealish, Alvarez, Haaland

The first match of any season involving top-flight clubs is the Community Shield, and that’s exactly where we find ourselves once more ahead of the 2023/24 campaign.

Arsenal and Manchester City will meet at Wembley on Sunday to battle for the first, and most minor, piece of silverware of the year, with the Premier League winners and runners-up having both been head-to-head in the transfer market this summer as well as towards the back-end of last term.

It was Pep Guardiola and his side who were triumphant on the pitch, winning the treble including the league ahead of the Gunners, but Mikel Arteta has managed to convince Declan Rice to move to north London instead of the northwest after leaving West Ham where he was captain.

We’ll likely see both clubs at least in the mix for major honours much later on this season, but the first meeting could be a far more open affair with minutes on the pitch and honing of tactics more important than the trophy on offer.

Here’s everything you need to know ahead of the match.

Pep Guardiola’s intended audience may have been in Barcelona. It often has been, though usually when he was their midfielder, captain or manager. In seven years in Manchester, Guardiola has frequently had to address matters at the Camp Nou, though it was usually only to deny that Lionel Messi was bound for the Etihad Stadium.

Now the subject of another saga is a player from his present, not the increasingly distant past. Manchester City’s summers seem to consist of two rituals: lifting the Premier League trophy and then enduring a wait to see if Bernardo Silva stays. The Portuguese’s most persistent admirers are in Catalonia. The other constant is that Barcelona repeatedly refuse to meet City’s asking price. Sometimes they receive no firm proposal while a cash-strapped club with a recruitment policy based on hoping their allure will encourage players to engineer their exit seemingly think they can acquire elite footballers on the cheap.

It is a team from another time, a glimpse of Arsenal’s post-Arsene Wenger identity crisis and Mikel Arteta’s decidedly imperfect inheritance. There are David Luiz and Shkodran Mustafi, Dani Ceballos and Ainsley Maitland-Niles, Alexandre Lacazette and Nicolas Pepe. They assume a greater pertinence now, and not merely as signs of the transformation of a side in three years.

They remain the only Arteta side to beat Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City, 2-0 in the 2020 FA Cup semi-final, courtesy of a brace from Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang. Now, as Arteta’s current and former clubs prepare to meet at Wembley again, this time in the Community Shield, there is the probability that the Arsenal starting XI will feature no survivors of one of the manager’s first major wins. Perhaps Kieran Tierney but Granit Xhaka, the last regular in Arteta’s strongest side, was sold in the summer.

And while Emi Martinez left Arsenal and went on to lift the World Cup, few of the others have experienced better times since Arteta’s FA Cup win.

Full read: