What Happens If You Bet on Arsenal to Win Every Game?
Arsenal fans had it good in 2025/26. Mikel Arteta finally got his hands on the Premier League trophy, ending a 22-year wait and doing it with a defence that leaked just 27 goals all season.
If you’d backed the Gunners to win every single one of their 38 league matches though, would you actually have made any money?
It’s a question every football bettor asks themselves at some point. Backing the champions blindly, week in, week out, sounds like the kind of strategy that should print money over a title-winning season.
In practice, it’s rarely that simple, because odds-on favourites don’t pay much when they win, and they still lose often enough to hurt.
We’ve gone through Arsenal’s entire 2025/26 Premier League campaign, match by match, applying a flat £10 stake on Arsenal to win every single game at the odds available beforehand.
Here’s exactly how that blind loyalty would have paid off.
The Rules of the Experiment
To keep this simple and fair, we’re using level stakes of £10 on the straight match-result market (Arsenal to win) for all 38 league fixtures, home and away.
The odds below reflect typical prices being offered by mainstream bookmakers before each kick-off, based on Arsenal’s form, opponent quality and home advantage at the time.
No each-way nonsense, no cashing out early, no hedging — just £10 on the nose, every single week, for the whole season.
Arsenal actually finished the season with a record of 26 wins, 7 draws and 5 losses from their 38 matches, scoring 71 and conceding just 27.
On paper, that’s an excellent platform for backing them every week. Let’s see what it actually returned.
Match-by-Match Breakdown
| Date | Opponent | Venue | Odds | Result | Score | P/L | Running total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 17 Aug | Man Utd | A | 2.10 | W | 0-1 | +£11.00 | +£11.00 |
| 23 Aug | Leeds | H | 1.30 | W | 5-0 | +£3.00 | +£14.00 |
| 31 Aug | Liverpool | A | 2.70 | L | 1-0 | -£10.00 | +£4.00 |
| 13 Sep | Nott’m Forest | H | 1.35 | W | 3-0 | +£3.50 | +£7.50 |
| 21 Sep | Man City | H | 2.20 | D | 1-1 | -£10.00 | -£2.50 |
| 29 Sep | Newcastle | A | 2.05 | W | 1-2 | +£10.50 | +£8.00 |
| 4 Oct | West Ham | H | 1.40 | W | 2-0 | +£4.00 | +£12.00 |
| 18 Oct | Fulham | A | 1.75 | W | 0-1 | +£7.50 | +£19.50 |
| 26 Oct | Crystal Palace | H | 1.45 | W | 1-0 | +£4.50 | +£24.00 |
| 1 Nov | Burnley | A | 1.50 | W | 0-2 | +£5.00 | +£29.00 |
| 8 Nov | Sunderland | A | 1.65 | D | 2-2 | -£10.00 | +£19.00 |
| 23 Nov | Tottenham | H | 1.70 | W | 4-1 | +£7.00 | +£26.00 |
| 30 Nov | Chelsea | A | 2.00 | D | 1-1 | -£10.00 | +£16.00 |
| 3 Dec | Brentford | H | 1.40 | W | 2-0 | +£4.00 | +£20.00 |
| 6 Dec | Aston Villa | A | 2.10 | L | 2-1 | -£10.00 | +£10.00 |
| 13 Dec | Wolves | H | 1.25 | W | 2-1 | +£2.50 | +£12.50 |
| 20 Dec | Everton | A | 1.85 | W | 0-1 | +£8.50 | +£21.00 |
| 27 Dec | Brighton | H | 1.75 | W | 2-1 | +£7.50 | +£28.50 |
| 30 Dec | Aston Villa | H | 1.65 | W | 4-1 | +£6.50 | +£35.00 |
| 3 Jan | Bournemouth | A | 1.95 | W | 1-3 | +£9.50 | +£44.50 |
| 8 Jan | Liverpool | H | 1.90 | D | 0-0 | -£10.00 | +£34.50 |
| 17 Jan | Nott’m Forest | A | 1.55 | D | 0-0 | -£10.00 | +£24.50 |
| 25 Jan | Man Utd | H | 1.55 | L | 2-3 | -£10.00 | +£14.50 |
| 31 Jan | Leeds | A | 1.30 | W | 0-4 | +£3.00 | +£17.50 |
| 7 Feb | Sunderland | H | 1.35 | W | 3-0 | +£3.50 | +£21.00 |
| 12 Feb | Brentford | A | 1.60 | D | 1-1 | -£10.00 | +£11.00 |
| 18 Feb | Wolves | A | 1.35 | D | 2-2 | -£10.00 | +£1.00 |
| 22 Feb | Tottenham | A | 1.85 | W | 1-3 | +£8.50 | +£9.50 |
| 1 Mar | Chelsea | H | 1.65 | W | 2-1 | +£6.50 | +£16.00 |
| 4 Mar | Brighton | A | 1.70 | W | 0-1 | +£7.00 | +£23.00 |
| 14 Mar | Everton | H | 1.45 | W | 2-0 | +£4.50 | +£27.50 |
| 11 Apr | Bournemouth | H | 1.45 | L | 1-2 | -£10.00 | +£17.50 |
| 19 Apr | Man City | A | 2.40 | L | 2-1 | -£10.00 | +£7.50 |
| 25 Apr | Newcastle | H | 1.55 | W | 1-0 | +£5.50 | +£13.00 |
| 2 May | Fulham | H | 1.35 | W | 3-0 | +£3.50 | +£16.50 |
| 10 May | West Ham | A | 1.55 | W | 0-1 | +£5.50 | +£22.00 |
| 18 May | Burnley | H | 1.30 | W | 1-0 | +£3.00 | +£25.00 |
| 24 May | Crystal Palace | A | 1.60 | W | 1-2 | +£6.00 | +£31.00 |
Swipe left to see the full table →
The Final Numbers
Staking £10 on Arsenal to win in all 38 Premier League games would have cost you £380 in stakes across the season.
Backing home and away, against relegation strugglers and title rivals alike, you’d have finished the campaign with a total return of £411, for a profit of £31.
That works out at a return on investment of just over 8%, which sounds modest next to Arsenal’s dominant final league table position, but is honestly a pretty healthy result for a season-long flat-staking exercise on a single team.
Plenty of punters who back favourites all season end up in the red once the draws and shock defeats are stripped out.
Home vs Away Breakdown
Now let’s take a look at the record of backing Arsenal blindly, broken down by home versus away results:
| Record | Staked | Returned | Profit/Loss | ROI | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Home | 15W–2D–2L | £190 | £219.00 | +£29.00 | +15.3% |
| Away | 11W–5D–3L | £190 | £192.00 | +£2.00 | +1.1% |
| Total | 26W–7D–5L | £380 | £411.00 | +£31.00 | +8.2% |
What jumps out
Almost all the profit came from home games. Backing Arsenal at the Emirates returned +£29 on its own — that’s 94% of the season’s total profit from just half the fixtures.
Away form barely broke even at +£2, despite Arsenal actually going unbeaten in more away fixtures proportionally in terms of not losing outright disasters — the away draws (5 of them) did the real damage.
The away draws were the silent profit-killer. Five draws on the road — Sunderland, Chelsea, Nottingham Forest, Brentford and Wolves — each cost a flat £10, wiping out £50 in stakes for zero return.
Compare that to home draws, where there were only two (Man City and Liverpool), both admittedly against the toughest possible opposition.
Home losses hurt more per-incident, but there were fewer of them. The two home defeats (Man Utd, Bournemouth) cost £20 combined, versus three away losses (Liverpool, Aston Villa, Man City) costing £30 — but those away losses were partly offset by longer away-win odds paying out better when they landed (e.g. +£11.00 at Old Trafford on the opening day, +£10.50 at Newcastle).
The takeaway: if you’d only backed Arsenal at home all season and left away fixtures alone, you’d have banked a much healthier 15%+ ROI from half the outlay and half the risk.
The away schedule — while still profitable — was where the draws quietly ate into the bank.
Why the Profit Wasn’t Bigger
Arsenal’s 12 non-wins are exactly why blind favourite-backing rarely turns into easy money.
Seven draws and five defeats over the campaign means over 30% of your bets lost outright, and crucially, some of those came at moments when Arsenal were still priced up as strong favourites — the home draw with Manchester City in September, back-to-back 0-0s against Liverpool and Nottingham Forest in January, and the shock home defeat to Manchester United on the reverse of their opening-day fixture.
The two matches against Manchester City were particularly costly, given City were priced closer to even money as genuine title rivals, meaning those losses stung more than a bet on a home win against Wolves ever could.
It’s also worth noting the run through November and December, where a loss at Aston Villa followed two draws in three games, nearly wiped out two months of steady progress in one stretch.
What This Tells Us About Betting on Favourites
The overall lesson here isn’t really about Arsenal specifically — it’s about what happens whenever you back a heavy favourite over and over across a long season.
Short-priced wins grow your bank slowly, while the inevitable draws and upsets arrive in bursts that can wipe out weeks of grinding profit in a single afternoon.
An 8% profit from blindly backing the eventual champions in every match is a solid outcome, but it also shows how thin the margins are even when you’re backing the best team in the country all season.
A slightly worse run of form, one more away-day upset, or a couple of the closer odds tipping the other way, and this experiment could easily have finished in the red rather than comfortably in profit.
Odds used in this article reflect typical bookmaker pricing at the time of each fixture and are for illustrative purposes. Always compare prices across bookmakers before placing a bet, and never stake more than you can afford to lose.
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