Football
Jonathan Smith, Manchester City correspondent 6y

Manchester City dynasty talk makes 'no sense' to Pep Guardiola

MANCHESTER -- Pep Guardiola says there's "no sense" talking about Manchester City building a dynasty when they haven't won a trophy in his time yet.

His City side top the Premier League by two points and have won their three opening games in the Champions League with some people predicting that he could dominate domestic football, just as he did at Barcelona and Bayern Munich.

But Guardiola finished his first season at the Etihad Stadium without a trophy and he says it's too early to talk about winning the title this season after the way their last campaign fell away after a good start.

"Firstly, to dominate before you had to win titles, and when you win you have to win the second one, the third one and the fourth one. And when that happens you can be considered dominant, but not one team has won a title in October.

There's no sense to talk about that," he told a news conference ahead of Saturday's game with Burnley.

"We can talk about Chelsea, who dominated last season, they won 13 or 15 games in a row, and how difficult that is to do in this country, but they were able to do that.

"I give Antonio [Conte] and his team a lot of credit to be able to do that. Now we're just in October, of course we are in good shape, in good momentum, but to say dominate you need titles, a lot. Not one, not two, a lot, and still we haven't won one."

City have been in brilliant form this season, drawing just one of their opening 12 games in all competitions and winning the past 10.

However, it was around this time last year that their title challenge began to falter with three successive home draws to Everton, Southampton and Middlesbrough.

And Guardiola has warned that the high-level football won't last all season and that he will learn a lot about his squad when the difficult times come around.

"We are in October, we cannot expect to finish the season like we have done in the last month when we won all the games, it's impossible in football in the high level," he said.

"But I want to see how we are going to react in that moment we drop points, we will see how strong we are because teams always show in the bad moments.

"When everything is going well, winning three or four, okay, it's important but it doesn't count for much. How you do in the bad moments is important."

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