Football’s Community Shield will be played in Cardiff instead of Wembley this weekend due to The Weeknd’s tour dates.
READ MORE: The Weeknd – ‘Hurry Up Tomorrow’ review: stadium-filling superstar prepares to move on
The match sees the champions of the previous Premier League season and the holders of the FA Cup go head-to-head, and is usually held at Wembley Stadium on the weekend before the Premier League begins.
This year, due to adjustments to the 2026-27 football calendar, the Premier League will begin on the weekend of August 22 – meaning that the Community Shield will be on the weekend of August 15 and 16. However, due to pre-planned concerts planned at Wembley, it will be held in Cardiff.
The decision comes as that weekend falls into the five dates that The Weeknd has planned for the stadium between August 14 and 19, as part of his 2026 ‘After Hours Til Dawn’ tour.
Instead of being at Wembley, the Community Shield will be taking place at The Principality Stadium, formerly the Millennium Stadium. This will be the seventh time that it has been relocated to Cardiff, having hosted six Community Shields between 2001 and 2006 while Wembley was under construction.
The stadium has also been decided as the venue for the first match of Euro 2028, which is being hosted jointly between England, Scotland, Wales, and the Republic of Ireland.
EUROPE & LATIN AMERICA 2026
AFTER HOURS TIL DAWN STADIUM TOUR
Sign up for presale access at https://t.co/qk4nbFNSwA pic.twitter.com/yJ2C6CbQZI
— Abel Tesfaye (@theweeknd) September 4, 2025
For The Weeknd, the tour comes as an extension of his record-breaking stadium tour, and was confirmed back in September. Upcoming tour dates lined-up for this year include shows in North America, South America, Europe and the UK between April and August. Visit here for a list of shows and here for tickets.
For the upcoming dates, €1 from each ticket sold across Europe, £1 in the UK, and the $1 equivalent in Mexico and Brazil will be donated to the FIFA Global Citizen Education Fund and the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) to provide funds to the XO Humanitarian Fund.
The tour comes in support of his latest album, ‘Hurry Up Tomorrow’, which was given a four-star review from NME and described as “a fitting – and intriguing – swansong”.
“Though ‘Hurry Up Tomorrow’ has plenty of his usual moody synth-pop, it’s also speckled with experimentation: he pulls off throbbing Brazilian funk on ‘São Paulo’ and flirts with Kanye-style chipmunk soul on ‘Niagara Falls’,” it read. “If this is a swansong for The Weeknd, it’s a fitting one. Tesfaye is pushing forward before he exhausts the collective fascination with his alter ego, and that’s no small achievement.”
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