Man City will be back competing for biggest prizes next season – Pep Guardiola | OneFootball

Pep Guardiola is convinced Manchester City will be back competing for the biggest prizes next season after learning from this year’s underwhelming campaign.

After four-successive Premier League titles and a glorious treble in 2023, City are left challenging for the relative consolation prizes of Champions League qualification and the FA Cup this term.

“I’ve said many times, the season has not been good, regardless (of whether) we reach the final or we go to the Champions League,” said City manager Guardiola, whose side face Nottingham Forest in the FA Cup semi-finals at Wembley on Sunday.

“Of course, we would avoid bigger damage for the club, but what dictates whether the season is good is the Premier League all the time because it gives you, week by week, happiness, good momentum.

“Next season will be better. I think everyone has learned the lesson. I think we’ll compete in the Premier League a little bit better than it happened this season.”

City moved into third in the table with victory over top-five rivals Aston Villa on Tuesday but the battle remains tight, with Forest, Chelsea and Newcastle also in close contention.

City find themselves in this position largely because of a damaging run in the autumn and early winter when they won just one of 13 games in all competitions and lost nine.

Performances have recovered since but the consistency of old has been lacking with six further defeats proving costly.

Guardiola detected a drop in team spirit but, with injuries biting, he was unable to make the changes he wanted.

He said: “We have to do better. The spirit, we need to recover.

“In celebrations, when we scored a goal, the way we celebrated it – we didn’t celebrate. When we scored the first goal in October, November, December, January – we didn’t celebrate in the way of the body language we celebrate.

“That is a stupid detail but it says a lot about the passion we had all the time in this season. We didn’t have it.

“But we had 12-13 players, we could not recover. We did not have the pace and energy that it is necessary to have.”

Victory at Wembley this weekend – and going on to beat Villa or Crystal Palace in the final – would put some gloss on the season but Guardiola feels it takes more than that.

He said: “The FA Cup win will not give you the certainty of coming back to what we were.

“OK, we’ll be happy because we compete to win – but that will not change it. We have to recover that spirit that we had during nine years.”

Guardiola, speaking at a press conference, said Erling Haaland and Rodri were making good progress in their recovery from injury but no comeback dates had yet been set.

Goalkeeper Ederson remains a doubt for this weekend.