SuperSport Kicks Off Football Season With FA Community Shield

The traditional curtain-raiser for the new season will see Premier League champions Liverpool play Arsenal in the 2020 Community Shield.

The game will be played at Wembley on Saturday 29 August 2020 from 6.30 pm EAT. The match could welcome a restricted number of supporters into Wembley as part of plans for supporters to make a socially-distanced return to sports venues more widely from October 1.

All DStv customers will have a front-row seat to the football action on SuperSport 3 and SuperSport 10 when the game broadcasts live and in HD. GOtv Max and Plus customers will also have access to the game on SuperSport Select 2 at no extra cost.

In line with our mission to enrich the lives of our customers we felt it important to kick off this new football season with a wider broadcast of the anticipated clash and make it an inclusive experience for all our valued customers” says Nancy Matimu, MD MultiChoice Kenya. The match will be immediately followed by an international break from September 2 to 10 before the 2020/21 Premier League season begins on September 12 until May 23, 2021.

Arsenal will be looking to make a big statement in the clash, with their FA Cup triumph at the end of the last season, signaling their intent to return to glory in what will be manager Mikel Arteta’s first full campaign in charge. In addition, they defeated Liverpool 2-1 when the teams last met – in a Premier League clash at the Emirates Stadium in mid-July – thanks to goals from Alexandre Lacazete and Reiss Nelson, though it was a match in which the Gunners clung on for the three points. Liverpool, meanwhile, are still basking in the glow of their first league title in 30 years, though manager Jurgen Klopp will want his side to quickly rediscover the hunger that drove them to glory through 2019-20.

Yet the German tactician has already admitted that his side will not be at their peak for the Community Shield: “From a timing point of view, the Community Shield is in the middle of the pre-season,” Klopp explained, “It will be a good game, I’m pretty sure. Arsenal is a good team, so it will be a good game, but both teams will not be the finished articles. How can we be after two weeks of training again and stuff like this? But that’s not important because both teams probably have the same situation, so it will be tough.”

“What I want to see from the boys, is that we play our football again. That’s it pretty much. And that we deal with the problems in the game in our way, that we create, that we prepare, that we are ready to defend together, that we have all the principles we worked on so long.”

Arsenal’s Arteta says he wants to see his side show the hunger to build on their FA Cup success and restore the London club to the top of English football. “I have to look at the players, how they come back from holidays, how they come after winning. I want to see that reaction,” said the Spaniard. “You know, are they going to be a little more relaxed because we’ve done something or are, they going to come with: ‘Okay, we have to go to the next level, we have to apply ourselves better, we have to improve in a lot of areas and we have to dominate many other aspects of the game that at the moment we cannot control’?.”

If that is the mindset, then I am very positive that we will be sitting here in a year’s time really happy. But I hope we take that road straight away.”