In fairness, that’s not what he had said. He compared the treble vs the CL. And for that he’s right. How many teams have won a treble, any treble, and how many times? We ourselves have 5 (soon to be 6) Big Years, and how many trebles? Same with United. City didn’t have enough history of being strong to make the statistics.
It's similar to the invincible vs more points than invincible without being invincible. Which is greater?
There are many who say the invincible season of Arsenal - and maybe there's an argument for having that over 93 points (I'm not saying either way), but beyond 95 and above points, it's only going one way and I've held that opinion for a long time. People even compared invincible season to 100 points season of City and claimed that invincible is still better and the main argument they come up with is that how many times it has been achieved/repeated?
I respectfully disagree. I think Man City's 100 points is greater (without considering their off the pitch issues with their club). You can never assess the difficulty of a competition by number of wins. For example, take the European Cup/Champions League and UEFA Cup/Europa League. Yes, there is a 16 years gap between the initiation of these two tournaments, but the EC/CL has been won 13 times by one team, then 7 times by another team, then 5 times by 3 sides whereas the UC/EL has been won 5 times by 1 team and 3 times by 4 teams. Does that mean the UC/EL is harder to win since there are no dominating sides as in the EC/CL? Europa League is harder than Champions League, right?
That is absolutely the wrong way to assess which is the harder one, the number of times it has been won. The better way, which is also arbitrary, is to see who is trying harder to achieve what.
Nobody really sets out at the start of a season to be invincible. I'm not saying it's not hard, it is, but when something is not really a target, how can you compare or assess with other achievements which are legit targets which teams are doing their best to achieve? All teams are trying to get to the most points, the invincible thing only becomes a 2nd target when a teams goes through 2/3rds of a season intact and can go for it without jeopardizing their main target, that is to win the title or get most points. Otherwise, if you remove most points as a target, then a lot of sides in history would've taken the approach to get to 15+ draws or something to achieve invincible status but getting a lot lesser points than they could. By increasing the number of teams attempting to be invincible (by removing the primary target of securing more points), we can easily get more teams to achieve the invincible status. It's like I want to do A and I'm trying my best to do A, so I'm getting to A more. I want to do A more than I want to do B, so when B is a sideshow, it doesn't mean that getting B is harder the getting A.
The same is with the treble and the CL. I respect the League title, but beyond that about the domestic cups, it's a matter of how many sides are arsed with these cups to try and win them. And coming to that stage also depends on the draw in the cups and how easy/hard the journey is. The only times teams try and make that a target is when that does not jeopardize your chances of achieving bigger targets. I mean Wenger won plenty of FA Cups, but were their fans satisfied? There were rumbles everywhere because they were poor in Europe, and they were just going Top 4 in the league. The moment they dropped out of Top 4, the cups failed to be consolation for them, they just weren't arsed anymore. It simply explains that these cups are not really primary targets of top teams, they are an afterthought. Once you see through that, it's clear that this is about the Premier League vs the Champions League and we know which one is the Bigger Club Competition and which one is the more challenging one.
See how much efforts Man City put in to win the CL and still came short by a mile, whereas with their treble, the two cups were piss easy with the routes, the League was their biggest challenge and that too only because we were around that territory. So, they were a consistent team over the season, but they didn't quite hit the peak to win the CL.
It's clear that Guardiola is still bitter that his team is not in the CL Final.