Chelsea vs. Man City: Can Pep Guardiola’s side win out and claim Premier League?

Eight games remaining in the Premier League and for Pep Guardiola the equation is clear. Only eight wins equals Manchester City as champions of England once more. The math probably works out. After all, City trail leaders Arsenal by nine points. They have a game in hand and crucially the Gunners have to come to the Etihad Stadium next week. If that game goes Guardiola’s way, the game is three points.

City would still need a helping hand elsewhere, possibly even two. Goal difference questions are still a bit thorny with this much football left to play. Suppose City replicated their two-goal win over Arsenal at Wembley in the EFL Cup final last month. Their goal difference would go up to +34, Arsenal’s down to +37. Maybe that is the sort of difference that can be overturned with one weekend where results go City’s way but it would be tight. It is for those reasons and many others that bookmakers offer odds that give Arsenal an implied probability of 89% to win the league. Opta’s projection model has the Gunners at 97.2%.

A good wedge of those simulations in the projection model will have City winning out in the run-in. As Guardiola put it in his pre-match press conference ahead of Sunday’s trip to Chelsea, it feels like the only way to get to top spot. “We have to win every single game,” he said. “Hopefully we can get a lot of points. The situation we are in in the Premier League, we need to get all of them otherwise it will not give us a chance to try until the end.

Eight from eight is a challenge in any season. In this season of increased parity where there is arguably only one objectively bad team in the division — hey at least City get to play Burnley before the campaign is over — it is even harder. Only one team has done what Guardiola is demanding of his team — Aston Villa winning every game between November 9 and December 27. City came closer than anyone else during a similar time frame, reeling off six on the spin up to a 2-1 win at Nottingham Forest immediately after Christmas Day, but there have only been two other occasions in 2025-26 where they have gone three of three.

“We need to get a lot of points,” said Guardiola, who might just have been referring to his side’s last league match, a 1-1 draw at West Ham, when he added: “We have not been consistent enough in the season. We have dropped points that we should have taken which is why we are now in the position where we cannot do it differently.”

At this point, you are probably thinking that if any team can come alive down the stretch it is City. In principle, you would be right. In what we might term the age of Haaland, the four years since the No. 9 left Borussia Dortmund for the Etihad, the two longest in-season winning runs in the English top flight belong to the big man’s team. Remarkably they are both close out runs too. In 2022-23, City went 12 from 12 to reel in Arsenal. A year later City went nine from nine to, drum roll, reel in Arsenal. You might not have known the numbers but you knew this, just like Guardiola does, just like Arteta probably does. When City get hot, they’re scorching.

Or should that be when City got hot? It is the best part of two seasons now in which Guardiola’s team have, if you are being very generous, intermittently reached the level of their exceptional forebearers. In the 12 game streak of late 2022-23 City’s non-penalty expected goals (npxG) per game numbers looked like this: 1.81 for, 0.77 against, 1.05 difference. The following season they were 2.16 for, 0.82 against, 1.33 difference.

At points this season, including the last few games, City have had the look of a team who can attack about as well as their forebearers. To do so they have to play with such abandon that, as the graph below shows, they have never really looked like the sort of lockdown force that they were in pursuit of the title two or three years ago.

CBS Sports

Of course, you don’t have to be prime City to win. Villa proved that earlier this season (their npxG difference per game was 0.07 as they reeled off eight straight). It sure helps though. After all it’s a pretty rough route to the finishing line for Guardiola’s side. After Chelsea and Arsenal it’s Burnley away of course but Everton, Brentford, Bournemouth and Villa could be a gamut of teams with plenty to play for late on.

Now, of course, a team that has just blitzed Liverpool and swaggered past Arsenal should see nothing to fear in the fixture list to come. Indeed, if you were looking for evidence of a team that can win out this season, you wouldn’t have to go much further than the second half of the EFL Cup final. City can play at that level but they can also play at a level that sees them give up a dozen plus shots to Leeds, Fulham and Tottenham. If that team is still lurking in City colors then they will find it hard enough just to beat Chelsea, let alone to stick another seven on top.