Being one of the largest and most prestigious football events, UEFA Champions League attracts millions of viewers as well as thousands of betting enthusiasts from across the globe. As we are now approaching the halfway point of the tournament, there is a lot of excitement and speculation over who will win. The bookmakers also tend to be particularly generous with their market selections and offering great odds at this time. So, what are the current UEFA Champions League betting odds and who is the bookie’s favourite to win? Let’s have a look!
UEFA Champions League betting odds
Much like the world cup, the Champions League outright winner feels like anyone’s guess a lot of the time. However, this season is a little bit different, with Manchester City leading the way as the bookies’ favourite by quite a substantial margin.
The outright odds for Manchester City to win the league is 15/8. For a competition that is soon to go down to the best 16 clubs teams in Europe, in which anything can happen over a two-leg knockout game, these are very short odds indeed.
This becomes even more complimentary of city’s form when we consider that they have never previously won a Champions League. As experienced as Pep Guardiola is in Europe, he seems to have a lot of bad luck and underperformance in the competition with Manchester City. So, we can put most of this bookies’ confidence down to their form, and the acquisition of Eerling Haaland, who has scored 15 goals in 10 Premier League games so far. A transformational bit of business.
Bayern Munich are next in line as the bookies favourite, at around 5/1 on most websites. Bayern Munich are the only team to have scored more goals in the group stage so far than Manchester City, showing their dominance. Plus, they won the title in 2012/13 and 2019/20, and such recent wins do help boost confidence.
But, when looking at recent winners, it’s quite remarkable then to see Real Madrid, who are comfortably top of the La Liga, at 12/1, behind PSG (7/1) and Liverpool (8/1). This suggests the chance of Real Madrid of winning the Champions League as 8%, which is fairly low for the current title holders and having won the competition 5 times since 2014.
Our picks
It’s difficult to bet against Manchester City, but we have often thought this in the past just before they let us down. If we wanted to look at sheer value, Real Madrid at 12/1 appears to be the best. And, this is keeping in mind that they often underperform in the group phase, but really show their experience later in the competition when it really matters. Plus, Manchester City might have Haaland up front, but Madrid have the current Ballon d’Or winner, Karim Benzema.
Liverpool are arguably too out of form to be considered for the Champions League, and Paris Saint-Germain suffer from the same drawback as City in that they have never won it. But with being undefeated in Ligue 1 so far and Haaland’s current form, 2023 could be a year for a new winner.
