Man City Premier League Titles

Manchester City have won the Premier League eight times, with four of those wins coming in a row between 2020-2021 and 2023-2024, which is a feat that no other English club has managed. It is a strange thing to write about a club that spent much of the competition’s first 15 years finishing mid-table or worse, but City’s Premier League story really only gets going once you reach the 2011-2012 campaign and from there it barely lets up.

Three different managers have delivered a title for the Cityzens, with the first coming under Roberto Mancini before Manuel Pellegrini got involved and then Pep Guardiola took things to a whole new level, winning six of the eight on his own. This page covers City’s relationship with the Premier League specifically, so their earlier First Division championships and their FA Cup, League Cup and Champions League exploits belong elsewhere on the site.

Premier League Wins

Here’s a look at the various Premier League titles that City have won over the years in more detail.

Agüero’s Last-Gasp Winner (2011-2012)

City’s first Premier League title came at the end of the 2011-2012 season. It remains the most dramatic top-flight finish English football has produced, with perhaps only Arsenal’s win at Anfield in 1989 bearing comparison. It is also still the only time that the title has ever been settled on goal difference. Their next three league wins, by comparison, were won with a degree of control that eventually became the story in itself. City stopped being the club needing a miracle finish and became the side that other teams needed a miracle to catch.

Under Roberto Mancini, City ended a 44-year wait for the league title on the 13th of May 2012 in about as dramatic a fashion as possible. Needing to beat Queens Park Rangers at home to pip rivals Manchester United on goal difference, City trailed 2-1 deep into stoppage time before Edin Dzeko headed an equaliser and Sergio Agüero won the ball, exchanged passes with Mario Balotelli and scored with virtually the last kick of the season. The goal came 93 minutes and 20 seconds into the game, after Manchester United had already finished their own game at Sunderland believing they were champions.

Pellegrini Adds a Second (2013-14)

Two years later and now under new management in Manuel Pellegrini, City won a second title thanks a 2-0 win over West Ham on the 11th of May 2014. Goals from Samir Nasri and Vincent Kompany did the job. City finished on 86 points, two clear of Liverpool, who had led the race for much of the run-in before losing against Chelsea at Anfield and then drawing 3-3 at Crystal Palace having three goals up. It was also part of a domestic double, with City having already won the League Cup earlier in the season.

Guardiola Announces His Arrival (2017-2018)

Pep Guardiola’s first title, in 2017-2018, turned into one of the most one-sided seasons that the division has seen. City wrapped up the championship with five games still to play, then kept going, finishing on a record 100 points and becoming known as ‘the Centurions’ when Gabriel Jesus found a stoppage-time winner away at Southampton on the last day to bring up the milestone. They retained the title in 2018-2019 by just one point ahead of Liverpool, having had to win their last 14 league matches in a row to do it.

City sealed that title win with a 4-1 win at Brighton, then completed the first clean sweep of English domestic honours a week later by winning the FA Cup. The 2020-2021 title, won with Manchester United’s defeat at Leicester on the 11th of May 2021 confirming it with three games still to play, was secured largely behind closed doors during the pandemic. The following season produced another final-day classic, this time with City trailing Aston Villa 2-0 with barely a quarter of an hour left, before they scored three times in 12 minutes to win 3-2 and pip Liverpool.

City Set a Record (2023-2024)

City won a third straight title in 2022-2023, confirmed when Arsenal lost at Nottingham Forest, as part of a continental treble completed a few weeks later in Istanbul. Their fourth in a row, in 2023-2024, was the first time any English club had managed the achievement, which is quite remarkable when you think about it. City needed to beat West Ham United at home on the final day and did so 3-1, finishing two points above Arsenal, which was the second year running that the Gunners had come up just short against City.

Near Misses & Second-Place Finishes

City’s four Premier League runners-up finishes tend to fall either side of their two great runs of dominance, and each has come against a team enjoying a standout season of its own.

In 2012-2013, the season after their first title, City finished second to a Manchester United side enjoying Sir Alex Ferguson’s last, and arguably one of his most comfortable, championship win. United wrapped it up with four games to spare and finished 11 points clear.

The 2014-2015 season brought a similar story, with City finishing eight points behind Jose Mourinho’s Chelsea, who won their fourth title with a defence that conceded barely more than half a goal a game.

The heaviest of the lot came in 2019-2020, when Liverpool finally ended a 30-year wait for the league title and did it with such authority that City’s second-place finish, decent by any normal measure, looked almost incidental. Having missed out to City in cruel fashion a year earlier, albeit with the blow softened thanks to a Champions League win, the Merseyside club’s celebrations ended up being somewhat muted thanks to the pandemic striking towards the end of the season.

In 2025-2026, City finished runners-up to Arsenal, who ended their own 22-year wait for the title by finishing seven points clear of the team that manager Mikel Arteta had previously worked for as an assistant to Guardiola. Arsenal had spent the previous three seasons finishing second themselves before finally getting over the line and this time it was City left looking at their coat-tails.

Disasters & Upsets

City’s Premier League history has not been an unbroken run of near misses and improbable finishes, however. It has also produced a relegation, thanks to one of the more spectacular final-day thrashings that the competition has served up and, more recently, a collapse dramatic enough to end a run of four straight titles.

The low point came in the 1995-1996 season. Manager Alan Ball’s side went into the final day needing to avoid defeat at home to Liverpool to have any chance of staying up and got exactly that, coming back from 2-0 down to draw 2-2. The trouble was that City believed, wrongly, on the basis of information filtering through from elsewhere, that the draw was already enough and began openly running down the clock in the corner rather than chasing a winner that might have secured survival outright. Results elsewhere went against them and City went down on goal difference.

The Sportswashing Era Ends Major Failures

Ball called that the greatest disappointment of his career. It would take City the better part of two decades, and a change of ownership, to become anything like the force they are today. Twelve years on, City closed out the 2007-2008 season by losing 8-1 away to Middlesbrough, still one of the heaviest defeats by a top-half club in Premier League history. Richard Dunne was sent off early under Sven-Goran Eriksson and Middlesbrough’s Afonso Alves helped himself to a hat-trick as City fell apart in the second-half. It changed nothing about their final position.

The most recent entry is less a single afternoon than an entire season. Having just completed a fourth consecutive title, City’s 2024-2025 campaign disintegrated into the worst Premier League form of the Guardiola era, including the first five-match losing run of his management career and, at one particularly grim point, only one win from thirteen league games. An injury list that at various points removed most of their defence, plus the season-long loss of Ballon d’Or winner Rodri, did not help. City finished third on 71 points, their lowest haul since 2015-2016.

Thank goodness for the arrival of an owernership group from Abu Dhabi looking to pour money into the team or else most of the club’s seasons would have looked just like that.