Man City Trophies & Honours

Manchester City have gone from top-flight makeweights to one of England’s most decorated club within about 15 years. Since the 2008 takeover changed the scale of what was possible at the Etihad, the trophy count has climbed faster than any other Big Six side can match, seeing ten league titles, eight FA Cups, nine League Cups and, in 2023, a Champions League, allowing them to answer anyone who said that all that spending would never buy Europe’s biggest prize.

Most of that belongs to Pep Guardiola, who spent a decade rewriting what an English club could win in a single season before handing over to Enzo Maresca in the summer of 2026. He left the club having steered City to a domestic cup double in his final campaign, which was a fitting send-off for a manager who turned serial winning into the club’s default setting. Whatever Maresca builds next will be judged against a genuinely extraordinary run, even if non-City supporters would point to the asterisk that could be attached.

League Titles

• Premier League Titles: 8
  • Seasons: 2011-2012, 2013-2014, 2017-2018, 2018-2019, 2020-2021, 2021-2022, 2022-2023, 2023-2024
• First Division Titles: 2
  • Seasons: 1936-1937, 1967-1968

Premier League

City’s Premier League story really begins on the 13th of May 2012, which is the day that Sergio Agüero scored with virtually the last kick of the season to beat Queens Park Rangers 3-2 and snatch the title from Manchester United on goal difference. It was City’s first top-flight championship in 44 years and the goal itself, scored with 93 minutes and 20 seconds on the clock, has become one of the most replayed moments in Premier League history.

Manuel Pellegrini added a second Premier League crown in his first season in charge, 2013-2014, which was a title built on goals rather than defensive control. City edged out a Liverpool side that had led for much of the run-in, finishing two points clear with 86 points, which was sealed thanks to a 2-0 win over West Ham United on the final day.

City then spent a couple of seasons working out how to turn their newly acquired wealth into a period of dominance, rather than just sporadic success. That job fell to Pep Guardiola, who arrived in 2016 and delivered six titles in seven seasons between 2017-2018 and 2023-2024, missing out only in 2019-2020 to Liverpool. The run from 2020-2021 to 2023-2024 was the real landmark, winning four top-flight titles in a row. That is a feat that no club had managed in the 135-year history of English top-flight football.

Guardiola achieved it by building squads that were deep enough to treat injuries and rotation as they happened, rather than allow them to turn into a crisis. The run finally ended in 2024-2025, when Liverpool reclaimed the title in an unexpected manner, after Jürgen Klopp has departed Anfield and been replaced by Arne Slot. City then slipped further, finishing as runners-up behind Arsenal in 2025-2026, as the Gunners ended their own 22-year wait for the title. Guardiola’s league dominance may have run its course, but eight Premier League titles still leaves City clear of every Big Six rival bar Manchester United.

Before the Premier League

City’s two pre-Premier League titles bookend a stranger story than most. The first, in 1936-1937, ended in one of English football’s great oddities. City followed up their inaugural title win by being relegated the following season, despite scoring more goals than anyone else in the division. That is still the only time that the reigning champions in English top-flight history has been relegated the year after winning it.

Redemption, of sorts, came in 1967-1968, when Joe Mercer and Malcolm Allison’s side won the title on the final day with a 4-3 win at Newcastle United, whilst local rivals Manchester United lost at home, meaning that City finished two points clear at the top. The 44 years between that title and the next were not short of drama, just trophies, which makes the transformation that followed all the more striking. Of course, none of it would’ve been possible without the influx of cash that came from the Abu Dhabi United Group takeover.

Cup Wins

• Champions League Wins: 1
• FA Cup Wins: 8
• League Cup Wins: 9

Man City’s cup record covers the full spread, having seen them win Europe’s biggest prize, both English domestic cups and a series of smaller honours picked up along the way. Where the league title has occasionally slipped from City’s grasp in the past few seasons, the cup cabinet has kept filling up regardless, with Guardiola’s final campaign amongst them.

Champions League

• Champions League Wins: 1
  • Season: 2022-23

Manchester City brought Guardiola on board to win them the Champions League, which they came close to achieving when the made the final in Porto in 2021 and faced Chelsea. Kai Havertz’s first-half goal proving the difference between the two sides. That remains City’s only other trip to a European Cup final, at the time of writing, but there was another occasion that they came close. In 2022, they made it to the semi-final against Real Madrid, seemingly winning after City led 5-3 on aggregate deep into stoppage time, only to result in in one of the competition’s most infamous late collapses.

The club has reached one Champions League final and won it, beating Inter Milan 1-0 in Istanbul on the 10th of June 2023. That victory came courtesy of a second-half strike from Rodri, which completed a continental treble that included the Premier League and the FA Cup alongside the Champions League in the same season. That made City only the tenth club in the competition’s history to manage that treble and it finally delivered the trophy that had eluded the club’s owners since their 2008 takeover.

FA Cup

• FA Cup Wins: 8
  • Seasons: 1903-1904, 1933-1934, 1955-1956, 1968-1969, 2010-2011, 2018-2019, 2022-2023, 2025-2026

Eight wins across 122 years puts City behind only Arsenal and Manchester United on the FA Cup’s all-time list. The first four came well before the Premier League existed, thanks to victories over Bolton Wanderers in 1904, Portsmouth in 1934, Birmingham City in 1956 and Leicester City in 1969, each win being separated by decades. They were the sort of once-a-generation event that supporters at Maine Road could tell their kids about, long before anyone talked about a Big Six.

The modern era has been considerably more productive. Yaya Touré’s late strike helped the Cityzens to beat Stoke City in 2011, ending a 35-year wait for a major trophy and announcing City’s return as a force under their new ownership. Guardiola then added three more, the first of which was thanks to a 6-0 demolition of Watford in 2019. That remains one of the most one-sided finals that the competition has ever seen. It was followed by a fiercely contested 2-1 derby win over Manchester United in 2023 as part of the aforementioned treble-winning season.

A 1-0 defeat of Chelsea in 2026 closed out the Spaniard’s decade in charge, but hasn’t all been one-way traffic over the years. A shock 1-0 defeat to Wigan Athletic in the 2013 final remains the one blot on City’s modern FA Cup record and the full story of that afternoon belongs on the dedicated FA Cup page.

League Cup

• League Cup Wins: 9
  • Seasons: 1969-1970, 1975-1976, 2013-2014, 2015-2016, 2017-2018, 2018-2019, 2019-2020, 2020-2021, 2025-2026

Nine League Cup wins make Manchester City the competition’s second-most successful club behind Liverpool, with their record in the final bordering on intimidating. They have made ten appearances in the competition’s final and have suffered just one defeat. Early wins in 1970 and 1976 were followed by a 38-year gap, before City rediscovered the competition in what is described by critics as the club’s ‘sports-washing era’.

Manuel Pellegrini won it twice, in 2014 and 2016, before Pep Guardiola turned it into a personal specialty. Consecutive wins from 2017-2018 to 2020-2021, four in a row, set a club record and briefly made the competition feel like a formality whenever City reached Wembley. A fifth Guardiola triumph followed in 2026, beating Arsenal 2-0 through a Nico O’Reilly brace, which made him the League Cup’s most successful manager in the competition’s history, ahead of Sir Alex Ferguson and Brian Clough.

Add the club’s other major honours, the 2023 UEFA Super Cup, won on penalties against Sevilla, and the FIFA Club World Cup a few months later, a 4-0 win over Fluminense, and City spent the back end of 2023 collecting nearly every trophy available to them off the back of that Champions League win. It is unlikely to be repeated any time soon, by City or anyone else, but it says plenty about the level Guardiola’s side reached, and the money that they spent, that it happened at all.