For the eighth consecutive time, Manchester City have booked their place in the FA Cup semifinals. Pep Guardiola’s men are looking to win their second trophy of the season, and are one step closer thanks to an Erling Haaland hat trick, pushing them to a 4-0 victory at home over Liverpool. The FA Cup has been a competition dominated by City, who have now won 18 consecutive home matches in the competition — from the semifinals on, which are played at Wembley Stadium instead of home venues — and they’ll look to keep their form going against whatever comes next.
Those 18 consecutive wins are a competition record, but despite City reaching the final in the last three editions of the FA Cup, they’ve only won one of those, a triumph over Manchester United. That record surpassed Clapham Rovers’ total of 17 straight home wins in the FA Cup between 1873 and 1881, and City’s run dates back to Feb. 2017, with their last home defeat coming at the hands of Middlesbrough in Jan. 2015. But Guardiola may trade some of those wins for more titles.
Of course, with Haaland in this kind of form, it doesn’t matter who City face, and reaching a critical juncture in the campaign, they’ll need him to keep this going. This was Haaland’s first match with multiple goals since December of 2025, which may not seem significant, but when City has struggled for a secondary option in the attack, any game in which he doesn’t carry them is one where City may lose.
It’s part of why they’re now out of Champions League play, but after showing that they could beat a full-strength Arsenal side in the EFL Cup, where they picked up their first trophy of the season, there may be hope of closing the gap to capture the Premier League title. They trail by nine points but have a game in hand on the Gunners and a head-to-head match on April 19. Win both of those, and that could be enough to turn the tide after Arsenal have come in as runners-up in the Premier League for three consecutive seasons. The Gunners may have led for most of the campaign this season, but it’s a moment where City can ramp up the pressure, and they’ll need Haaland to be able to do it. Multiple goals in moments like this are a good start, as they have no margin for error.
Next up are matches against Chelsea, Arsenal, and Burnley, so we’ll see pretty quickly what City have left in them, if anything, before April comes to a close, but this FA Cup triumph shows that the top level needed to overturn this deficit is still there.
