MANCHESTER — Manchester City's more than £900m in inflated accounts helped fund a transfer outlay of roughly £1.2bn on players between 2009 and 2018, about £900m in net spend, during the era in which an independent commission found the club knowingly broke financial rules. The club has confirmed an appeal against the guilty verdict, but analysis of that spending shows the previous clubs of Sergio Aguero, Kevin de Bruyne and Bernardo Silva were among 46 different clubs in 19 national league systems to receive significant transfer fees from City in that period.
The total does not include free transfers, loans or academy graduates, and the headline fees exclude additional costs such as agents fees, legal expenses and signing-on bonuses that also flowed to background figures in deal-making. Just over a quarter of City's total transfer outlay in the timeframe was paid to clubs in the English top flight, with eight Premier League clubs and eight La Liga clubs receiving fees, while a combined £13m was spent on two players in the Championship. For some recipients, the fees paid by City were the highest the clubs had ever received at the time.
For many of the biggest recipients, the influx did not translate into sustained success. Wolfsburg immediately spent about half the fee received for De Bruyne in 2016 on winger Julian Draxler, plus veteran defender Dante among others, then dropped from second to eighth in the Bundesliga before narrowly avoiding relegation in the subsequent two seasons. Monaco, the second highest-ranked club by fees received after selling Benjamin Mendy and Bernardo Silva in the same summer, signed Terence Kongolo and Keita Balde as direct replacements who did not work out long-term as the club fell from winning Ligue 1 and reaching the Champions League semi-finals to almost being relegated within two years. Arsenal, the club City purchased most players from in the period with four signings, did not mount a serious Premier League title challenge during that time.
The spending also reshaped markets beyond direct deals. Manchester City paid very similar totals to Benfica and Porto during the era but nothing to Sporting, the third member of Portugal's big three, which did not win a title between 2009 and 2018. City's willingness to pay higher fees and wages lifted asking prices for everybody else, making it difficult for selling clubs to reinvest effectively. Ancillary sell-on clauses also delivered windfalls to clubs City did not deal with directly, including roughly £9m to Queens Park Rangers from Raheem Sterling's 2015 move from Liverpool, about £7m to Barnsley from John Stones' 2016 move from Everton, and about £2.5m to Wolves when Joleon Lescott moved to Manchester in 2009 — with the Sterling and Stones clauses worth more than most players in the English Football League at the time and remaining Barnsley's highest sale to this day.
The analysis counters arguments that the inflated spending delivered a net benefit to the game by enriching other clubs, showing that having cash to spend offered no guarantee of it being well spent. The findings follow City's appeal announcement and renewed scrutiny of the case, including Rui Pinto's witness protection status as the whistleblower linked to the disclosures.