MANCHESTER CITY ARE TREBLE DREAMING AS CHAMPIONS LEAGUE, PREMIER LEAGUE AND FA CUP TITLES NOW IN SIGHT
Defending Premier League champions Manchester City are now just three wins away from winning the treble and could clinch the most coveted domestic trophy in English football on Saturday, the Premier League title.
The Citizens sit atop the league standings with 85 points, having played one less game than fellow title contenders, Arsenal, who have amassed 81 points across 36 games so far this season. The sky blues bulldozed past Real Madrid in the UEFA Champions League semi finals, winning their second leg tie on Wednesday this week with a staggering 4-0 score line, and have a date set with their Manchester rivals, Manchester United in the FA Cup final on Saturday, May 27th.
While the prospect of winning only the second ever treble in English football history is an enticing one, Manchester City manager, Pep Guardiola has been careful throughout the season to steer away from any talks of the team winning multiple pieces of silverware. The Spaniard didn’t shy from the thought, however, after his team booked its ticket into the UEFA Champions League final on Wednesday.
Asked if he was comfortable talking about the treble now, Guardiola said, “Yeah. We’re closer. Let me win the first two. In the Premier League, we are close. We need one more game, and then against our neighbors [Manchester United] and the final in the Champions League against an Italian team. The season is really, really good. It is really done already…
“How much we’ve had fun this season, again and again. We make our fans happy all around the world, watching us. They saw a good team play [tonight]. This is the biggest compliment and we are not going to change that now. We are close [to winning the treble] and of course we are going to try.”
City host Chelsea at the Etihad Stadium on Saturday and could clinch their third consecutive Premier League title, a feat that has only been achieved twice in the league’s history. Sir Alex Ferguson and Manchester United were the only Premier League team to ever accomplish a three-peat Premier League title, something that they did twice, and a European treble.
Ferguson first won the English league title, FA Cup and Champions League titles in the 1998/99 season, kick starting a three season period of Premier League success. The Scottish manager would win the Premier League in three consecutive seasons again between 2007 and 2009. Guardiola and Manchester City have a chance to etch their names in both three peat and treble records this season, and could start with a win against their old Champions League rivals, Chelsea, this weekend.
Manchester City are on a 23-match unbeaten run across all competitions and are a team that’s not short of confidence. “The confidence is not the number 23,” Guardiola said after their win against Real Madrid on Wednesday. “The confidence is the behavior in every single game. We played against Sheffield United in the semifinals of the FA Cup. That game, we were confident. When we played at Goodison Park… [Our players] they don’t choose the competition. They go and everyone does it well.”
This is City’s second Champions League final in three years, having lost to Chelsea in Porto in 2021. The Catalan-born manager spoke about how difficult it is to win the competition and the progress the team has made in recent years in the competition.
“What we’ve managed is every year, we’ve managed to be there, or thereabouts in every competition,” said Guardiola. “And now it’s our turn to play in a final. One day, if we play in so many finals, we’re going to win one. We will one a Champions League.
“You know I’ve got Barca in my heart. We had to get to four finals before we won it. You learn from finals in the past and you can’t add anything else to that. These are big teams we are talking about, that we’re playing against. May and June, the teams that are involved in that time of the year are great sides and we’ve behaved like a great side in the last few years. We’re involved at the end of the season.”
While a treble would certainly cement City’s status as the best team in English football and certainly one of the best in the world, this wouldn’t be the club’s first treble under Pep Guardiola. The Citizens won the domestic treble in the 2018-19 season sweeping the Premier League, EFL Cup and FA Cup on the way to a 98-point season finish.
As per the UK’s The Sun, Champions League success would see Manchester City net an incredible £117.2 million with Premier League and FA Cup success adding £164 million and £3.9 million respectively. The sum total means the Citizens would earn a grand total prize of £285.1 million if they can pull off the treble, a figure that would go a long way to help sustain most football clubs in Europe and beyond.
Manchester City has done incredible things in seven years under Pep Guardiola, including amassing a record 100 points in a season in 2017-18 and edging out 97-point Liverpool in 2018-19 to win the Premier League title. But a treble would certainly be the cherry on the top of what has been a more than successful Pep tenure.
City have been in search of a maiden Champions League trophy ever since their new Emirati owners landed in Manchester in 2008, and could bring their search to an early end just 15 years into their new ownership.
Winning the Champions League is a ridiculous achievement for a club that only a couple of decades ago was a yo-yo team in English football, trading Premier League football with Division I (Championship) and Division 2 (League One) play. Whether City can pull it off in the next three weeks and collect all three titles is still up in the air, but one thing’s for sure, no one is counting them out.
   “They’re just fantastic. You would not pull it past them [to get it done],” said Arsenal legend Ian Wright this week after Guardiola’s side’s 3-0 demolition of 17th-placed Everton in the weekend. “I would never say that this is over until it is mathematically done. You would not pull it past them to get the treble because they’re so good. The team is well drilled. Everybody is focused. Everybody knows exactly what they’ve got to do at this stage of the season. They’re in a different place.”
-Maher Abucheri
Twitter: @pabloikonyero
Photo: Richard Cooke. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.