This season is the same as every other season: It begins with Pep Guardiola's Manchester City favored to win the league.
Even in 2016-17, his first season with the club -- in a campaign that featured things like Claudio Bravo starting in goal, or Bacary Sagna and Gael Clichy pretending to be inverted full-backs, and ended with them finishing 15 points behind first-place Chelsea -- Man City started it off as the bookmakers' pick to win it all.
And the bookmakers have almost always been right. Outside of that first season and the 2019-20 season when Liverpool won the second-most points in league history, City have won the Premier League in six of Pep Guardiola's eight seasons in charge. If anything, the bookmakers have undervalued City's dominance.
Manchester City have won the league 75% of the time across the Guardiola era, but their preseason odds have never been proportionately high. If you'd bet City to win the league before each of the past eight seasons, you'd have made a significant profit.
Now, one of the ways that I've managed not to lose all of my money is that I've respected the betting markets as a source of knowledge, rather than something to be exploited. The market tells us what is most likely to happen in sports to a more accurate degree than any other source of publicly available information -- if it didn't and people could just easily beat the posted numbers, the sportsbooks would go out of business.
With that in mind, ESPN BET's current odds give Manchester City a 47.6% chance (+110) of winning the Premier League this season. Take out the vig (the fee that books essentially charge you to place a bet), and the odds are even lower than that. So, with kickoff for the 2024-25 season just days away, Manchester City are still the individual favorites win it -- but even if financial regulations don't ruin City's campaign, the field is favored over City.
Here's why -- and why Arsenal might be the real favorites by some measures this season.