Premier League’s Refreshed Landscape Leaves Gunners Primed to Repeat

It’s the start of a new era in the Premier League. After a decade of dominance, Pep Guardiola is gone from Man City, while Liverpool are led by their second new boss since Jurgen Klopp.

Arsenal not only enter the season as defending champions, but as clear favourites to win again, after an eight-year period that saw the league won only by City (six times) and Liverpool (twice).

After winning the Premier League by seven points, Arsenal enter the 2026/27 season as +120 favourites to defend their English crown. That status is well earned, as the foundation of their title-winning squad remains, while they bolstered their squad with the addition of one of the league’s best midfielders in Bruno Guimaraes.

A quartet of challengers with odds shorter than 20/1 chase them, but each of the four comes with concerns:

It’s a new world for Man City (+350), who begin life without Pep. Concerns around new manager Enzo Maresca aside, it’s unquestionably a worse team than last year. Former Ballon d’Or winner Rodri, who won the Golden Ball during Spain’s World Cup triumph this summer, has left, along with standard-bearer Bernardo Silva. Though they’ve injected youth into their midfield, this appears to be a season of transition for the league’s most recent dynasty.

There’s optimism around 2024/25 champions Liverpool (+500) after Arne Slot’s firing, with hope that new manager Andoni Iraola can unlock Florian Wirtz and Alexander Isak, after the pair cost a combined $450 million ahead of underwhelming debut campaigns last year. But there's concern around an aging, middling defense, as well as legitimate questions about how Iraola will adapt to a jam-packed fixture list after he rose to prominence with relatively small clubs who weren’t competing in Europe.

There is hope at Manchester United (+700). Over the last 17 games of last season, after Michael Carrick was brought in as interim manager, no team earned more points than Man United's 39 points. But they were helped massively by a thin schedule, having already crashed out of both cups and not playing in Europe. Their slow build back to respectability should continue this season, but it will be about remaining in the top five and securing Champions League play for a second straight campaign, not contending for the title.

The league’s most confounding club in recent years, Chelsea (+800), continued to puzzle over the summer. Their transfer business remains relentless and unpredictable, but with manager Xabi Alonso in place, there’s good reason to believe they’ll finally find stability. Alonso can hardly be blamed for the mess of Real Madrid last season, and is much closer to the manager who oversaw one of the most impressive seasons ever in European soccer with Bayer Leverkusen. 

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Odds as of August 20, 2026.