Pep Guardiola says it is ‘impossible’ for Manchester City to repeat the treble

Pep Guardiola believes it will be impossible for Manchester City to repeat last season’s treble, with the manager stating the feat is a “once in a lifetime” achievement.

City became only the second club to win the Premier League, Champions League and FA Cup and Guardiola, who won an equivalent treble with Barcelona in 2008-09, moved to dampen expectations before his team begin their title defence at Burnley on Friday night.

“It will be impossible to do what we did last season,” he said. “It’s once in a lifetime. I said to the players: ‘Forget about it. We climbed the highest mountain last season with what we have done.’ But the last two days we came down from the mountain and we start from there, everyone with the same intention. There will be a lot of difficulties to climb the mountain as high as possible – we’ll see.

“Our football, our behaviour, our mentality will dictate how the season will be. In football, in sport, what we have done remains in our hearts and our minds, how nice it was, but it’s over. Every season we start from zero again but history speaks for itself when you achieve something that we have done – it’s almost impossible to repeat.

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“We have to be aware of that and hopefully our fans, like ourselves, can understand how difficult it was and so we just try to do a good performance at Burnley, and after Newcastle, and after Sheffield [United]. Game by game, no more than that.”

Guardiola expects the squad and his coaching staff to motivate each other. “We have to challenge ourselves, we have to push each other. If people expect I’m the only one who has to do it, this would not be possible ... Let’s go step by step. Recover who we are. This job is short. Use every season as an opportunity.”

Guardiola said Josko Gvardiol, City’s new £77 million defender, was available.