How Man City completed the Premier League, FA Cup, Champions League treble led by Guardiola & Co.

The blue double decker bus carrying Manchester City's treble winners pushed slowly through the streets of Manchester city centre on Monday evening to give the crowd a chance to celebrate a team that didn't just complete the most successful season their club has seen, but one of the greatest seasons ever. The mood wasn't dampened too much by the change in weather from sun to rain as City fans turned out to welcome their team home, after most players made a brief stop in Ibiza on Sunday night.

Pep Guardiola's men, after winning the Premier League title, FA Cup and Champions League during the 2022-23 campaign, have taken their place among some of history's most iconic teams including Ajax in 1972, Manchester United in 1999 and Barcelona in 2009. But as the afternoon sun turned into a typical Manchester rain shower, the trophies glinted and the beer flowed, it was easy to forget that this season has not been without its difficulties for Guardiola and his players.

As far back as July, Guardiola assessed his squad and told staff that he was concerned about their hunger for more success. He sensed the motivation had slipped, only slightly, having won back-to-back Premier League titles, but ever the perfectionist, he considered it a major problem. Worse though, according to some of those around the City manager, was that he didn't know how to fix it.

Never staying for more than four years at either Barcelona or Bayern Munich in his previous coaching jobs, Guardiola was firmly in uncharted territory as he prepared for a seventh season at the Etihad Stadium. Despite spending part of the summer with his family in Barbados, he too felt a little jaded. There were points during the summer when he admitted he wasn't looking forward to the new season, particularly with the prospect of a winter World Cup on the horizon.

However, Monday's celebrations in the streets of Manchester proved Guardiola's concerns to be ill-founded as Man City completed a remarkable campaign. Here's how they got to football's summit in 2022-23.

It was during preseason that Guardiola saw for the first time where the threat to City's Premier League title might come from. After hearing that Arsenal had beaten Thomas Tuchel's Chelsea 4-0 in Florida, Guardiola raised his eyebrows and said, "Wow." Afterward, Gunners manager (and former City assistant) Mikel Arteta tried to play down the significance of the result, but Arsenal had already caught Guardiola's attention.

But before everyone else caught onto Arsenal's title credentials, City's season started with the Community Shield against their main rivals for the previous four years: Liverpool.

Erling Haaland, the striker signed amid much hype in the transfer window, missed a golden chance as City lost 3-1 at Leicester's King Power Stadium and immediately the questions started about whether the Norway international could cut it in England. Guardiola sought out his striker after the game, believing he might need to lift his spirits, but before the conversation could start Haaland laughed and said, "Don't worry, I'll score goals."

He wasn't wrong. Haaland scored nine in his next five games, including back-to-back hat tricks against Crystal Palace and Nottingham Forest, and ended the season with 52 in all competitions.

Much of Guardiola's early-season work focused on how to get the best out of his new forward. Before Haaland arrived from Borussia Dortmund, Guardiola assured the player's father, Alfie, that City could play in a way that would suit the 22-year-old, pointing in particular to his work with Robert Lewandowski at Bayern. But City's 2021-22 title success was built around a system without a striker and it took time to adapt to Haaland's skill set.

The plan that Guardiola developed involved asking the creative players to look for Haaland first when they received the ball. They didn't have to pass to him, but they had to look before they made a decision about what to do next, and Guardiola wanted to see them do it.

During the early weeks of the season, Kevin De Bruyne, Jack Grealish and Bernardo Silva were shown videos of Haaland's movement and asked, "Did you look?" If the answer was "no," there would be a slight reprimand and a reminder that a striker is no good without the ball.

Haaland has helped Guardiola as much as Guardiola has helped Haaland, too. The City manager, according to sources, has enjoyed the challenge of building another team around him but it was another young player, Rico Lewis, who was at the centre of a crucial spell in City's season.

The biggest fear around the club ahead of the campaign was that Guardiola's contract -- due to run out in June 2023 -- could turn into a distraction. There were internal conversations about whether Julian Nagelsmann, then at Bayern, would be a good fit if a replacement was needed, and it was a relief when Guardiola travelled to Abu Dhabi during the World Cup break to sign a new two-year deal.

Even with Guardiola's future secured, it was not all plain sailing when the season resumed. Guardiola wasn't happy with the body language of some of his players in training and it was soon slipping into matches.

City drew with Everton at the Etihad in their second Premier League game after the restart and then in January suffered back-to-back defeats to Southampton in the Carabao Cup and Manchester United in the Premier League. In their next game, City had to come back from 2-0 down to beat Tottenham Hotspur 4-2, and afterward Guardiola exploded in his news conference, branding his players a "happy flowers team."

Behind closed doors he was even more brutal, accusing his squad of being "soft" while also revealing that his preseason fear that the hunger had drained away was being proved right. One of the only positives, he said, was Lewis, the teenage defender who was thrust into the team after the World Cup.

Highly rated by the youth coaches who had worked with Lewis since he joined that club at eight-years-old, a year earlier he was playing for the Under-21s in a 5-0 defeat in front of fewer than 2,000 fans at Rotherham.

The 18-year-old, according to Guardiola, didn't have the "arrogance" to expect to win every game just by turning up, and played like it. The manager encouraged others to follow the youngster's example. Lewis also possessed the technical ability to show Guardiola that it was possible to play with a defender who also moved into midfield, a role John Stones perfected during the run-in.