Winning the Treble is an achievement reserved only for football’s most dominant teams.
It takes an elite level of skill, determination and concentration – and no shortage of luck – to claim the domestic league title, main continental tournament and primary domestic cup competition in the same season.
Such is the difficulty of the task, only one team in English football history – Manchester United in 1998/99 – has achieved it.
However, after a thrilling weekend of action in England, it now looks likelier than ever that a team will emulate United’s historic accomplishment.
After booking its place in the Champions League semifinals with a 4-1 aggregate win over Bayern Munich, Manchester City then reached the FA Cup final on Saturday with a comfortable 3-0 victory over second-tier Sheffield United at Wembley Stadium.
That win came a day after Arsenal once again threw away points in the Premier League title race, drawing 3-3 at home to relegation-threatened Southampton to hand the initiative to City for the first time all season.
City trails Arsenal by five points at the top of the Premier League but crucially has two games in hand, with the two teams facing off in a huge title clash at the Etihad on Wednesday.
Entertainment data company Gracenote now gives City a 79% chance of winning the Premier League and Arsenal just 21%.
Despite City now being a maximum of just 12 games away from a potential Treble, manager Pep Guardiola is refusing to get caught up in the possibility.
“I’ll talk to you about it after we have won the FA Cup and Premier League,” he told reporters after the FA Cup semifinal, per the BBC.
“Before the final of the Champions League we will start to talk of the Treble. Look how far away it is. We are far, far away. How many times in this amazing country have Trebles been done? How many years? How many teams?
“It is one. Once. Our neighbors did it in how many centuries? Am I excited about the Treble? Not at all.”
There has been an inevitability about Manchester City in recent weeks as the team has gone on a rampaging 16-game unbeaten run in all competitions and improved with each passing game over that stretch.
Led by the relentless Erling Haaland, whose 32 Premier League goals equal the record for a 38-game season with eight matches of the current campaign still remaining for City, Guardiola’s side has been scoring goals at will.