What Happens If You Bet on Man City to Win Every Game? The 2025/26 Season Tested
Manchester City finished the 2025/26 Premier League season as runners-up, missing out on the title to Arsenal by seven points despite racking up 23 wins, 77 goals and a goal difference of plus 42.
On paper, that looks like exactly the kind of season a “back the favourites every week” strategy was built for.
So we ran the numbers. If you’d put £10 on Manchester City to win every single one of their 38 league matches in 2025/26, at the odds available before each kick-off, would you have walked away in profit? The answer is more interesting — and more of a cautionary tale — than you might expect.
This is the follow-up to our look at what happens if you back Arsenal all season. City’s story turns out to be a very different one, even though both clubs spent most of the year at the top of the table.
The Rules of the Experiment
Same method as before: level stakes of £10 on the straight match-result market (City to win) across all 38 Premier League fixtures, home and away.
The odds reflect typical bookmaker pricing before each game, based on City’s form, the opponent and home advantage at the time. No cashing out, no each-way, no hedging — just £10 on City, every single week.
City’s final record was 23 wins, 9 draws and 6 losses from 38 matches, scoring 77 and conceding 35.
That’s a genuinely strong season by most measures, and one that kept them in the title race until the second-to-last weekend. Let’s see what backing them blindly actually returned.
Match-by-Match Breakdown
| Date | Opponent | H/A | Odds | W/L | P/L | Running total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 16 Aug | Wolves | A | 1.45 | W | +£4.50 | +£4.50 |
| 23 Aug | Tottenham | H | 1.30 | L | -£10 | -£5.50 |
| 31 Aug | Brighton | A | 1.90 | L | -£10 | -£15.50 |
| 14 Sep | Man Utd | H | 1.55 | W | +£5.50 | -£10.00 |
| 21 Sep | Arsenal | A | 2.60 | D | -£10 | -£20.00 |
| 27 Sep | Burnley | H | 1.20 | W | +£2 | -£18.00 |
| 5 Oct | Brentford | A | 1.75 | W | +£7.50 | -£10.50 |
| 19 Oct | Everton | H | 1.35 | W | +£3.50 | -£7.00 |
| 26 Oct | Aston Villa | A | 2.05 | L | -£10 | -£17.00 |
| 2 Nov | Bournemouth | H | 1.40 | W | +£4 | -£13.00 |
| 9 Nov | Liverpool | H | 2.10 | W | +£11 | -£2.00 |
| 22 Nov | Newcastle | A | 2.20 | L | -£10 | -£12.00 |
| 29 Nov | Leeds | H | 1.25 | W | +£2.50 | -£9.50 |
| 2 Dec | Fulham | A | 1.80 | W | +£8 | -£1.50 |
| 6 Dec | Sunderland | H | 1.30 | W | +£3 | +£1.50 |
| 14 Dec | Crystal Palace | A | 1.70 | W | +£7.00 | +£8.50 |
| 20 Dec | West Ham | H | 1.35 | W | +£3.50 | +£12.00 |
| 27 Dec | Nott’m Forest | A | 1.85 | W | +£8.50 | +£20.50 |
| 1 Jan | Sunderland | A | 1.75 | D | -£10 | +£10.50 |
| 4 Jan | Chelsea | H | 1.65 | D | -£10 | +£0.50 |
| 7 Jan | Brighton | H | 1.55 | D | -£10 | -£9.50 |
| 17 Jan | Man Utd | A | 2.15 | L | -£10 | -£19.50 |
| 24 Jan | Wolves | H | 1.30 | W | +£3 | -£16.50 |
| 1 Feb | Tottenham | A | 2.00 | D | -£10 | -£26.50 |
| 8 Feb | Liverpool | A | 2.60 | W | +£16 | -£10.50 |
| 11 Feb | Fulham | H | 1.40 | W | +£4 | -£6.50 |
| 21 Feb | Newcastle | H | 1.60 | W | +£6 | -£0.50 |
| 28 Feb | Leeds | A | 1.65 | W | +£6.50 | +£6.00 |
| 4 Mar | Notts Forest | H | 1.30 | D | -£10 | -£4.00 |
| 14 Mar | West Ham | A | 1.90 | D | -£10 | -£14.00 |
| 12 Apr | Chelsea | A | 2.05 | W | +£10.50 | -£3.50 |
| 19 Apr | Arsenal | H | 2.30 | W | +£13 | +£9.50 |
| 22 Apr | Burnley | A | 1.35 | W | +£3.50 | +£13.00 |
| 4 May | Everton | A | 1.95 | D | -£10 | +£3.00 |
| 9 May | Brentford | H | 1.35 | W | +£3.50 | +£6.50 |
| 13 May | Crystal Palace | H | 1.30 | W | +£3 | +£9.50 |
| 19 May | Bournemouth | A | 1.75 | D | -£10 | -£0.50 |
| 24 May | Aston Villa | H | 1.55 | L | -£10 | -£10.50 |
Swipe left to see the full table →
The Final Numbers
Staking £10 on Manchester City to win in all 38 league games would have cost you £380 across the season.
Despite City winning 23 of those matches, the final return came to £369.50 — a loss of £10.50, for an ROI of minus 2.76%.
That’s a genuinely surprising result for a team that finished second in the Premier League with a plus-42 goal difference.
It’s a useful reminder that a strong league position doesn’t automatically translate into a profitable backing strategy, especially when the non-wins pile up at inconvenient moments.
Why Backing City Actually Lost Money
The damage was done early and compounded late. City lost their opening two home and away league tests in quick succession — a shock home defeat to Tottenham and an away loss at Brighton — sending the running total to minus £15.50 inside three matches.
From there, a mid-September draw at Arsenal and an October loss at Aston Villa kept the tracker in the red for most of the season’s first two months.
The middle of the season told a different story, with a run of eight straight wins from late November through December (Leeds, Fulham, Sunderland, Crystal Palace, West Ham and Nottingham Forest among them) briefly nudging the total into a healthy plus £20.50.
But three consecutive draws to open 2026 — against Sunderland, Chelsea and Brighton — wiped almost all of that away in a fortnight, and a further loss at Old Trafford dragged the total back into deficit by late January.
Even City’s storming spring form, including statement wins at Liverpool and at home to Arsenal, couldn’t fully repair the damage.
A cluster of draws in March (Nottingham Forest, West Ham) and again in May (Everton, Bournemouth) meant the final two months never built the cushion needed to finish comfortably in the black.
Home vs Away Breakdown
| Record | Staked | Returned | Profit/Loss | ROI | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Home | 14W–3D–2L | £190 | £207.50 | +£17.50 | +9.2% |
| Away | 9W–6D–4L | £190 | £162.00 | -£28.00 | -14.7% |
| Total | 23W–9D–6L | £380 | £369.50 | -£10.50 | -2.8% |
Backing City at home would have been profitable on its own — a +9.2% ROI from the 19 fixtures at the Etihad, not far off Arsenal’s home returns in our previous article.
The problem was entirely on the road: City’s away form, while still perfectly respectable in points terms, produced six draws and four losses from 19 matches — over half their away games failed to return a winning bet, and the two extended away losing/drawing runs (October, and again in January–February around Tottenham and Sunderland) did real damage to the bank.
The away wins that did land often paid well — Liverpool at 2.60, Arsenal’s reverse fixture, Chelsea at Stamford Bridge — but there simply weren’t enough of them relative to the away draws stacking up at shorter, less forgiving prices.
What This Tells Us About Betting on Favourites
Nine draws and six losses across a season sounds manageable when a team still finishes second with 78 points.
But from a betting perspective, that’s 15 matches — nearly 40% of the fixture list — where a straight win bet returned nothing.
Combine that with City’s odds rarely drifting much beyond even money even in tougher away fixtures, and there simply wasn’t enough margin in the winning bets to absorb the drawn ones.
This is the flip side of the coin from our Arsenal experiment, where the champions’ tighter defensive record and fewer draws turned a similar staking pattern into a modest profit.
City’s season had more genuine quality on the pitch in several respects — more goals scored, an FA Cup and EFL Cup double — but a betting strategy built purely on backing them to win doesn’t care about cup runs or goal difference.
It only cares about how often the “win” box gets ticked, and for City in 2025/26, that wasn’t often enough to turn a serious 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.
Leave a Reply
Want to join the discussion?Feel free to contribute!