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The treble winners

League, cup and European Cup in one season. Eleven times in seventy years.

The game is named after it, so it is worth being precise. In European football "the treble" means three trophies in a single season: the domestic league, the main domestic cup, and the European Cup — called the Champions League since 1992. Plenty of clubs have won two of the three. Up to the end of the 2024–25 season, only nine clubs had won all three, two of them twice.

Why so rare? Each trophy asks something different. The league rewards depth and consistency over thirty-odd matches. The cup is a sequence of one-off ties where a single bad evening ends everything. The European Cup is both at once: a long group or league stage and then knockout football against the best sides on the continent. Winning all three means being the best team over nine months and surviving every coin-toss along the way. That is exactly the tension Treble Winner's season is built around.

Celtic, 1966–67

The first, and in some ways still the most remarkable. Jock Stein's Celtic won the Scottish league and the Scottish Cup, and on 25 May 1967 beat Inter 2–1 in the European Cup final at the Estádio Nacional outside Lisbon. Inter scored early from a penalty and then defended; Tommy Gemmell equalised and Stevie Chalmers won it. Celtic became the first British club to win the European Cup, and the side has been known ever since as the Lisbon Lions. They won the Scottish League Cup that season as well.

Ajax, 1971–72

Ajax had won the European Cup in 1971 under Rinus Michels. When Michels left for Barcelona, the Romanian Ștefan Kovács took over and gave the players more freedom. In 1971–72 Ajax won the Eredivisie and the KNVB Cup, and beat Inter 2–0 in the European Cup final in Rotterdam with two goals from Johan Cruyff. It was the second of three European Cups in a row, and the purest expression of what the world came to call Total Football.

PSV Eindhoven, 1987–88

Guus Hiddink's PSV are the treble winners nobody puts in their all-time lists, and the record explains why. They won the Eredivisie and the KNVB Cup, but in the European Cup they did not win a single match from the quarter-finals on: they went past Bordeaux and Real Madrid on away goals after two draws each, and the final against Benfica in Stuttgart finished 0–0. PSV won the shoot-out 6–5 when goalkeeper Hans van Breukelen saved from António Veloso in sudden death. Ronald Koeman, Eric Gerets, Søren Lerby and Wim Kieft were the core of the side.

Manchester United, 1998–99

Alex Ferguson's United won the Premier League on the final day and the FA Cup against Newcastle a week later. Then, in the Champions League final at the Camp Nou on 26 May 1999, they trailed Bayern Munich 1–0 from a sixth-minute Mario Basler free kick going into stoppage time. Teddy Sheringham equalised and Ole Gunnar Solskjær scored the winner, both from corners, both in added time. Roy Keane and Paul Scholes missed the final through suspension. It was the first treble won by an English club.

Barcelona, 2008–09

Pep Guardiola's first season as a senior manager. Barcelona won La Liga, beat Athletic Bilbao 4–1 in the Copa del Rey final, and beat Manchester United 2–0 in the Champions League final in Rome, Samuel Eto'o scoring early and Lionel Messi heading the second. Xavi, Andrés Iniesta and Sergio Busquets made up the midfield. It was the first treble won by a Spanish club, and the start of one of the most celebrated eras any club has had.

Inter, 2009–10

José Mourinho's Inter won Serie A, the Coppa Italia, and then the Champions League final against Bayern Munich at the Santiago Bernabéu, 2–0 with both goals from Diego Milito. On the way they knocked out Guardiola's Barcelona in the semi-final. Inter remain the only Italian club to have won the treble. Mourinho left for Real Madrid days after the final.

Bayern Munich, 2012–13

Jupp Heynckes's Bayern won the Bundesliga by a huge margin, the DFB-Pokal against Stuttgart, and the Champions League in the first all-German final, beating Borussia Dortmund 2–1 at Wembley. Mario Mandžukić scored the first and Arjen Robben the winner a minute from time — a year after Bayern had lost the final at home to Chelsea, with Robben missing a penalty in extra time. The first German treble.

Barcelona, 2014–15

Luis Enrique's first season. With Messi, Luis Suárez and Neymar in attack, Barcelona won La Liga, the Copa del Rey against Athletic Bilbao again, and the Champions League final against Juventus in Berlin, 3–1 through Ivan Rakitić, Suárez and Neymar. Barcelona became the first club to win the treble twice.

Bayern Munich, 2019–20

Hansi Flick took over in November 2019 and Bayern barely lost again. They won the Bundesliga and the DFB-Pokal, and then won a Champions League finished in a single-venue tournament in Lisbon because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The final, against Paris Saint-Germain, was played behind closed doors and won 1–0 by a Kingsley Coman header. Bayern won every one of their eleven Champions League matches that season; on the way they beat Barcelona 8–2 in the quarter-final.

Manchester City, 2022–23

Guardiola's second treble, with a second club. City won the Premier League, beat Manchester United 2–1 in the FA Cup final with two goals from İlkay Gündoğan, and won the club's first Champions League in Istanbul, 1–0 against Inter through Rodri. Erling Haaland scored more than fifty goals in his first season. Guardiola became the first manager to win the treble twice.

Paris Saint-Germain, 2024–25

Luis Enrique matched him two years later. Paris Saint-Germain won Ligue 1, beat Reims 3–0 in the Coupe de France final, and then won the club's first Champions League by beating Inter 5–0 in Munich — the biggest winning margin in the history of European Cup finals. Achraf Hakimi, Désiré Doué twice, Khvicha Kvaratskhelia and Senny Mayulu scored. Kvaratskhelia had joined from Napoli only in January; he followed Kakha Kaladze, a winner with Milan in 2003 and 2007, as a Georgian European champion.

What the eleven have in common

Inter keep turning up. They won one treble and were the beaten finalists in four others: against Celtic in 1967, Ajax in 1972, Manchester City in 2023 and Paris Saint-Germain in 2025.

Some came at once, some took years. Kovács at Ajax, and Guardiola and Luis Enrique at Barcelona, won the treble in their first season in charge, and Flick in the season he took over. Ferguson had been at United for more than twelve years, and Guardiola won City's in his seventh season there.

The finals are tight. Five of the eleven European finals were won by a single goal and one on penalties. Only Paris Saint-Germain's was a rout.

The treble winners in Treble Winner

Every one of these sides is in the game, but you will not always find the whole team in one place. A cell is a club and a decade, and a season that straddles two decades is split between them. The table below puts each treble in the cell of the year its season ended — United's 1998–99 in the 1990s, Inter's 2009–10 in the 2010s — and shows how the game rates that cell today. The numbers are recalculated from the live squad pool.

At the time of writing, Celtic and PSV are outside the fourteen clubs of the Normal pool and Ajax's 1970s are outside its five decades, so those three sides can only be drafted on Hard. A best-XI rating is not a verdict on the treble side itself: it measures the best eleven players the club had in the whole decade, which is why a side like PSV in 1988, built on a strong collective rather than famous names, rates well below the decade's glamour cells.

Read more about the clubs: Ajax, Manchester United, Barcelona, Inter, Bayern Munich, Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain.