When is a trophy not a trophy? Don’t tell Pep about the Community Shield!

Is the Community Shield anything? Great minds have nagged at this conceptual knot since time immemorial and probably always will. It’s one of the classic philosophical paradoxes, like Schrödinger’s cat, or Trigger’s broom, or the one about trees falling unwitnessed in forests.

Over to Pep Guardiola, then, who appears now to be following José Mourinho in aligning himself firmly with one strand of the scholarship in this area. While in charge at Chelsea, Mourinho took the fundamentally empiricist line that, if you could count it with your other trophies on the fingers of your own hand, and wave those fingers slightly unpleasantly in the direction of board members who appeared to be cooling on you, the Community Shield most certainly was something. And now here is Guardiola, at the end of what many reasonably dismiss as a barren season for Manchester City, casting his eye over the top of the Premier League table.

“Newcastle won the Carabao Cup,” noted Guardiola, “Liverpool won the Premier League and Manchester City won the Community Shield. The other teams didn’t win anything.”

You did remember, didn’t you, that City won the Community Shield? Back in August? Against Manchester United? On penalties? After a 1-1 draw in the regulation 90 minutes? Got to admit, I looked up the finer details. But it’s all coming back to me now, obviously. Indelible images…

Anyway, it follows logically that if “the other teams didn’t win anything”, the Community Shield is, for Guardiola, “something”.

Is it, though? There’s a long history of academic discussion in this area which posits that the Shield is not something, and may even be, ultimately, the definition of nothing. Experts point out that the game traditionally happens a week before football starts. By that light, the Community Shield is not only not a trophy, it’s not even football.

Plus winning the Community Shield doesn’t qualify you for anything. That’s how you measure the importance of something these days – by gauging the extent to which it’s actually about something else. So last week’s Europa League final seemed to be less about the Europa League and more about the Champions League place on offer to the winners. Crystal Palace’s FA Cup win was quickly reframed as, more importantly, their ticket into the Europa League. Nobody was pointing out Palace had also just qualified for the Community Shield. Strong evidence for the argument that the Community Shield isn’t anything.

And yet … it exists. It is undeniably a trophy, in the literal sense. Quite a big one, actually. You can hit it with your knuckle and make it go “bong” – as, one likes to imagine, Guardiola has done on occasions this season, at the lower points, to cheer himself up. You aren’t expecting me to resolve this, are you? I’m as lost as anyone. It’s like the Fletcher/McCoist paradox. Utterly bamboozled there, too. If the commentator Darren Fletcher makes an observation and Ally McCoist doesn’t immediately say “I tell you what, Fletch, you’re not wrong”, can the truth of Fletcher’s observation be said to have been established or is it still up for debate?

Such a complex question. Will we ever finish unpicking it? All I know is that TNT certainly gives us plenty of opportunities. And each time another big night of European football passes through Fletcher and McCoist’s relentless blender, with the attendant blizzard of minimally relevant stats and the oddly sourceless mirth, I find myself arriving at my own philosophical position, which is that if you were behind this conversation on a plane you would quietly ask to move.

It’s all about the implications, though. Tottenham would not just be lifting a trophy, Fletcher informed us last Wednesday night, they would also be “completing their 150th win in Europe”. I tell you what, Fletch, nearly everything in football is about something else, there is almost always a point beyond the point, a prize beyond the prize. It’s exhausting. Indeed, it’s enough to make you want to join Guardiola in clinging anew to the Community Shield, something which is only ever what it is and no more.

But then you would have to agree that the Community Shield was something. And is it?