Since the verdicts declaring Manchester City guilty came in, and an appeal was announced, one argument has been pushed hard by the club’s backers in the media and online: that the money flowed around football, made other clubs richer, and helped teams everywhere, especially in the Premier League. The suggestion is that the game as a whole, and the clubs who received big fees from City, were net beneficiaries.
The more than £900m by which the independent commission found the club had inflated its accounts was not all spent on transfer fees. Clubs carry many bills — wages for players and other staff, utilities, insurance, infrastructure, commercial fees and more. But City’s spending on players between 2009 and 2018 came to roughly £1.2bn, a net spend of about £900m and more than anybody else managed in that period. The outlay was vital in making them England’s most successful club, and the commission’s conclusion that the rules were knowingly broken means it would surely have been heavily reduced otherwise. City have appealed against the guilty verdict.
Tracing City’s fundamental dealings with other clubs shows just how far the money travelled. Between summer 2009 and winter 2018, City paid transfer fees to 46 different clubs operating in 19 national league systems — a list covering senior players only, and excluding free transfers, loans and academy graduates. For several of those clubs, the City fee was the highest they had ever received at the time. Just over a quarter of the total transfer outlay went to clubs in the English top flight, and City signed players from eight Premier League clubs and the same number in La Liga. A combined £13m was spent on two players from the Championship.
Wolfsburg are one of the more revealing cases. After selling Kevin de Bruyne in 2016, they immediately spent about half the fee on winger Julian Draxler, along with others including veteran defender Dante. Having finished second, Wolfsburg dropped to eighth in the Bundesliga and then narrowly avoided relegation in each of the next two seasons.
Monaco, the second highest-ranked recipient, fared similarly badly. The most direct replacements signed after Benjamin Mendy and Bernardo Silva were sold to City in the same summer — Terence Kongolo and Keita Balde — did not work out in the long run. Within two years the club had gone from winning Ligue 1 and reaching a Champions League semi-final to almost being relegated.
Arsenal were the club City bought from most often in the period, four times, and did not mount a serious Premier League title challenge during those years. Elsewhere, City paid very similar totals to Benfica and Porto but nothing to Sporting, the third member of Portugal’s big three. Sporting did not win a title between 2009 and 2018. There are many reasons for that, but the fact their direct rivals received money from City that might not have been on offer under football’s financial rules raises an uncomfortable question.
The money also reached clubs City never dealt with directly, through sell-on clauses. Queens Park Rangers earned roughly £9m from Raheem Sterling’s move from Liverpool to City in 2015. Barnsley took about £7m of the fee City paid Everton for John Stones in 2016, and Everton had to pass on about £2.5m to Wolves when Joleon Lescott moved to Manchester in 2009. The Sterling and Stones clauses were worth more than most players operating in the English Football League at that time, and significantly strengthened the finances of QPR and Barnsley. To this day, Barnsley are not believed to have sold a player for a higher amount than they received for Stones.
Yet the sporting outcomes for those two clubs complicate the idea of a straightforward benefit. QPR have not returned to the Premier League, and Barnsley dropped from the Championship to League One after two seasons.
City’s spending during the years in which they were breaking the rules had an enormous impact — on their own upward trajectory, on the futures of clubs around the world, and on the wider football economy. But the reality is that the tapestry of football history during that time and since cannot be unweaved. Too much has happened, and there are too many indirect consequences. The effects will reverberate for years to come.