Pep Guardiola is confident Manchester City will be playing Champions League football next season after a hat-trick from Raheem Sterling helped blow away Brighton.

Sterling’s superb treble and goals from Gabriel Jesus and Bernardo Silva earned City a 5-0 success at the Amex Stadium which assures them of finishing runners-up to runaway Premier League champions Liverpool.

The club will on Monday discover the outcome of their appeal against a two-year ban from European club competitions following alleged breaches of club licensing and financial fair play regulations.

“The second goal is the real disappointing one from our perspective in terms of the timing and the manner of it. And then they’ve got confidence and second half wasn’t pleasant for us in terms of an experience.

“But Manchester City and Liverpool in four days is a tough ask and we weren’t good enough today to get anything.

“I’m not going to beat the boys up too much. We can be better, we know that.

“But at the same time the opposition were fantastic tonight, they really test you and they were worthy winners.

“We lost against Liverpool but I think we felt OK about it, today we don’t really feel OK about it.

“At the same time I don’t want to throw the guys under the bus because they’ve done brilliantly in terms of the lockdown, how they’ve handled themselves, how they’ve worked in the games.

“We just have to dust ourselves down.”