Manchester City revive treble chase after turbulent trophyless season

Manchester City are back in the place superclubs spend years trying to reach: one result from rewriting the narrative. A season that had looked like a reset now carries the possibility of another domestic treble, after a late Nico González winner against Southampton on April 25, 2026 pushed Pep Guardiola’s team into a fourth consecutive FA Cup final.

That is a striking reversal for a club that had spent the previous year confronting an unfamiliar kind of disappointment. City’s 2024-25 campaign finished without silverware in the Premier League, the domestic cups or Europe, their first trophyless season since Guardiola’s debut in 2016-17. For a side that had already built one of the most decorated modern dynasties, the absence of a trophy did not mean collapse. It meant a hard reset around the same core structure that made them dominant in the first place.

The backdrop matters because City were not starting from zero. In 2022-23, they completed a historic treble by winning the Premier League, the FA Cup and the UEFA Champions League, with Guardiola becoming the first manager to win two European trebles. By that point, he had already collected 14 major trophies at Manchester City, including five Premier League titles, two FA Cups, four League Cups, one Champions League and two Community Shields.

That record explains why the recent wobble has been read less as a downfall than as a test of durability. The club had already shown it could dominate across multiple competitions, and the current recovery suggests that the machinery beneath the success is still intact. A trophyless year changed the tone around City, but it did not erase the competitive habits that took them from Manchester to Istanbul and back into Wembley contention.

The Southampton win is the clearest sign that the structure still holds under pressure. A late González strike did more than settle a cup tie, it sent City into a fourth straight FA Cup final and kept alive the chance of a domestic treble. In practical terms, that means a team that once looked as if it might spend the season in transition is again one of the defining forces in English football.

The Athletic’s assessment captures the shift: what appeared to be a transitional campaign could yet become a special one. That is the essence of City’s revival. They have not simply strung together a few encouraging results. They have reached the stage of the season where a single late goal turns uncertainty into possibility, and where the path to another historic sweep remains open.

The comeback has been built less on spectacle than on continuity. Guardiola is still there, and that matters more than any short-term panic around a trophyless season. At elite clubs, managerial stability is often the first casualty of a setback, but City’s response has been to lean into the same leadership that already produced a treble and a long list of domestic honors.

That continuity extends beyond the dugout. The team’s ability to reach four straight FA Cup finals shows a squad still capable of sustaining deep runs in knockout football, even after a year without silverware. When a club keeps returning to major finals, it is usually a sign that its standards, not just its talent, have survived the downturn.

There is also a wider lesson in how City have handled the turbulence. Modern superclubs rarely move in straight lines. One season can look like decline from the outside, especially when the trophy cabinet stays shut, but the better measure is whether the club still controls the conditions around its decline. City did, and the evidence is visible in the turnaround from a first trophyless campaign since 2016-17 to a fresh shot at three domestic honors.

That is why the language around this season has shifted so quickly. The word “crisis” fit for a moment, because the standard at City is so high that anything less than a trophy-laden year feels abnormal. But the facts now point to recalibration rather than breakdown: Guardiola’s trophy count, the 2022-23 treble, the 2024-25 blank, and the 2026 surge back to Wembley all tell the same story.

If City complete the job, this season will sit differently in the club’s history. It would not be remembered as the year they slipped, but as the year they absorbed a setback and still found another route to dominance. That is what separates an ordinary rich club from a modern superclub: the ability to turn turbulence into structure, and structure into another chance at history.