admin Even if Manchester City celebrated a hat trick, it was clear what was to come. Jack Grealish folded his hands in prayer and begged Bernardo Silva not to leave.
Pep Guardiola sought out Riyad Mahrez for what appeared to be a meaningful farewell and after-party just days after he lifted the Nations League champions trophy to the people of Manchester. Ilkay Gundogan starred in the photo completing his move to Barcelona.
But the club isn’t finished yet, reports have surfaced that Kyle Walker has joined Bayern Munich to be inducted into the Hall of Fame alongside Aymeric Laporte, whose likely departure has long been known.
Outsiders, and many City fans too, may be wondering why, so soon after this success, the club are trying to present themselves as the best team in their history.
The reason so many first-team players will leave lies in the words of manager Pep Guardiola before the end of the season.
“People will now say only Manchester City can win the Premier League next season – stupid comments,” he said after the club lifted the trophy against Chelsea.
“The only problem with stupid comments is that they pop into your head.“Next season will be more difficult because all the clubs want to beat us. You don’t want one team to win, win, win all the time. They want to beat you and that’s the challenge.”
“But if they want to, they have to do it better than we do.”If that happens, it’s part of the sport, congratulations.
“After winning two Premier League titles, Guardiola has struggled with complacency all season.His frustration peaked after a 4-2 win over Tottenham Hotspur where he dubbed his team ‘the happy flower team’.
“From the first minute there was a lack of passion, fire and the will to win,” said Guardiola.“Our fans were silent for 45 minutes. We’re a long way from the team we used to be. We are far away from many things.”He’s not a player, they’re all here.
“They all are, as soon as we realize that, we’ll be back. Our fans have to push us, they have to ask for more, they have to shout. We were lucky today, but 9 times, 10 times you don’t come back.
“I want the reaction of the whole club, the whole organisation, the players, the staff. We are a team of happy flowers.”I don’t want to be a happy flower, I want to beat Arsenal, but if we play like this, Arsenal will destroy, they will beat us.
That’s why Guardiola wants to shake up the team. She knows that success can be addictive, but it can also quench your inner fire.So part of maintaining success is switching players who have had big wins and swapping out others who are competitive.
An interesting contrast to this approach is the last team to win a treble: Manchester United.
The ‘Rolex’ effect
After completing English soccer’s first-ever treble in 1999 legendary coach Sir Alex Ferguson signed no players.
The most notable decision by the club that year was to pull out of the FA Cup to avoid fixture congestion with the Intercontinental Cup it was due to play that winter.
If this refusal to change the side resulted in a lack of hunger it didn’t have an immediate effect.
The 1999/2000 and 2000/01 seasons ended with Manchester United winning successive Premier League crowns.
But captain Roy Keane felt the failure to strengthen in the wake of the treble did prompt a decline albeit later on.
After ending the 2001-02 season trophy-less the Irishman highlighted the moment of glory as the start of the team’s struggles.
“People used to say we won when we deserved to get beaten. Last season we were just beaten,” he said post-season.
“It was the team that leaked goals. The team. Finger-pointing was useless. We weren’t hungry fighters anymore.
“That feeling in my gut the night we clinched the treble kept coming back to my mind.
“The champagne was flowing, people were going crazy – but my belief was we had been lucky against a Bayern Munich team that bottled it.
“The following year we won the league by 10 points and Bayern Munich knocked us out of Europe. I felt sick to my heart.
“We should have bought big after the treble, gone for the best, freshened things up, attacked the complacency and let those who didn’t care if they never won another trophy join the sort of clubs that don’t win any.”
Interestingly, when the side’s form did start to falter it wasn’t the treble winners themselves who were blamed for the struggles.
Juan Sebastián Verón, Laurent Blanc, Fabien Barthez and Diego Forlán were all in different ways emblematic of the tricky evolution to the next generation of success.
None fulfilled their potential despite being hugely successful elsewhere.
Perhaps it should serve as a warning to Guardiola that the main issue United had was not that they lost their desire, it was that those who replaced players who peaked in 1999 weren’t able to replicate the success.
Not that Keane saw it that way, in his view attributing the dip to the newcomers was a cop-out.
“Blame Seba [Juan Sebastian Veron] – it’s too easy,” he said at the time, “some of the others were getting away with murder. Glory, believing the publicity, had cost us.
“Rolex watches, garages full of cars, mansions, set up for life – then forgot about the game and lost the hunger that got you the Rolex, the cars and the mansion.”
United did bounce back after 2001-02’s disappointment to reclaim the Premier League, but it was to prove the last for three seasons as Ferguson oversaw one of his most barren spells at the club.
This struggle came as the last remnants of the treble side were being replaced by the next great United team of that era who would also claim a Champions League trophy.
But in total that process took nearly a whole decade, so you can understand why City might want to move quicker.
