Manchester City can celebrate all they want but a dark cloud hovers over their Treble triumph

You could tell Jack Grealish meant business when he swaggered through the basement of the Ataturk Stadium carrying his own loudspeaker, plus a can of Heineken tucked none too discreetly beneath his Louis Vuitton man-bag.

That impression was reinforced as he lurched off Manchester City’s sky-blue Dreamliner, appearing barely to recognise what city he was in. After an express detour to Ibiza for a second successive all-night session with his team-mates, Grealish engaged full stag-party mode en route to the open-top bus parade, travelling on the tram with his shirt off.

It was said of Keith Richards in his dissolute Seventies extremes that he once stayed awake for nine days straight. Grealish, even with the enforced abstemiousness that has made him one of Pep Guardiola’s most reliable performers, appeared hell-bent on challenging that record. And why not? At 27, he was a treble winner, propelled by an adrenalin rush he might never experience again.

For all that Guardiola had been oddly subdued after the final whistle in Istanbul, clearly exhausted by a nerve-shredding final, he was back to his customary tricks for the celebrations, puffing on a giant Cuban cigar.

Erling Haaland found a few hedonistic flourishes to match his 52 goals of a stunning season, tipping a bottle of champagne over Grealish’s head.

But what to make of the rain? It did not arrive in a cooling summer squall but in a torrent, drenching revellers and leaving the bedraggled history-makers looking as if they had just taken a short-cut through a car wash. If you believed in the principles of pathetic fallacy, whereby ominous weather denotes impending trouble, it was difficult not to read a significance into the downpours.

For as hard as City partied, their euphoria was not universally shared. One elderly gentleman walked down Deansgate dressed in Manchester United’s own treble jersey of 1999, drawing looks of thinly disguised horror all round.

It was a reminder of how, despite City denying their neighbours the one remaining bragging right, the intensity of mutual enmity endured. 

Not that status anxiety is confined solely to the red half of Manchester. Desperate though City might be to excise any reference to 115 alleged financial irregularities, all of which they vehemently deny, the very existence of the charges offers a stick with which to beat them. While most rivals might be incapable of beating them on the pitch, they still feel emboldened to place an asterisk beside all these achievements while the legal battle is fought.

The accusations against City are grave, ranging from claims that the club hid the true source of their funding to an allegation that they only partially declared the salaries of players and of former manager Roberto Mancini. They are contesting it all, insisting they will furnish a “comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence” to “put this matter to rest once and for all”. The trouble is this process could take four years, and during that time you can be sure the denigrating by their opponents will not relent.

Guardiola was entertaining no such thoughts by the time he took to the stage, even welcoming the rain as quintessentially Mancunian. He deserved every plaudit, given the speed with which he has nurtured City into the most feared side on the planet, turning even relatively unheralded players such as Manuel Akanji into marvels. Where City’s greatness is a matter for complex debate, his own is unambiguous. Soon he will be planning for fresh conquests, for more improbable records. Quelling City’s dissenters, however, might prove beyond even his prodigious powers.