Manchester City spent £1.243bn on 76 players between the summer of 2009 and January 2018. An independent commission ruled on 29 September that £830m of the revenue underpinning that spending never existed as commercial income at all — it was Abu Dhabi United Group money routed through sponsorship contracts the panel described as a “concerted campaign to falsify” the club’s accounts. That figure equates to roughly 70% of the transfer outlay. The money did not evaporate, though. It left City’s accounts and landed in other clubs’ — in Monaco, Wolfsburg, Merseyside, Madrid and Lisbon — and it reshaped what each of those clubs did next.
Following the trail: who took City’s money
The single richest summer for a selling club was Monaco’s in 2017. City paid £49.5m for Benjamin Mendy and £43m for Bernardo Silva — more than £92m to one seller in one window, from a season in which City’s gross spend hit £273.27m, the highest of the nine years under scrutiny.
Elsewhere the trail runs through most of Europe’s second tier of selling clubs:
- Wolfsburg — £55m for Kevin de Bruyne in 2015, the deal that arguably decided three subsequent Premier League titles
- Everton — twice, £24m for Joleon Lescott in 2009 and around £47.5m for John Stones in 2016
- Atletico Madrid — about £38m for Sergio Aguero in 2011
- Athletic Bilbao — £55.9m for Aymeric Laporte in the January 2018 window, the last transfer inside the charged period
- Porto — £38.75m for Eliaquim Mangala; Benfica — £35m for Ederson
- Premier League rivals — £45m to Tottenham for Kyle Walker, £44m to Liverpool for Raheem Sterling, £26m to Aston Villa for James Milner
Arsenal supplied more players to City across the period than any other club — four, from Emmanuel Adebayor and Kolo Toure in 2009 to Gael Clichy and Samir Nasri in 2011. They did not mount a serious title challenge in any of the nine seasons. Sporting, alone among Portugal’s big three, sold City nothing and won no league title between 2009 and 2018 either. Benfica and Porto, who did sell, banked broadly similar totals.
What the sellers did with it — and why it rarely worked
The uncomfortable pattern is how little the windfalls bought. Wolfsburg finished second in the Bundesliga in 2014-15 with De Bruyne; they reinvested his fee in Julian Draxler for roughly half the money plus the defender Dante, fell to eighth, and spent the next two seasons avoiding relegation through the play-off.
Monaco’s £92m was recycled into Terence Kongolo and Keita Balde. Having won Ligue 1 and reached the Champions League semi-finals in 2016-17, they were fighting relegation within two years. Everton’s two sales to City funded squads that never cracked the top four.
That is the mechanism the commission’s findings expose. Inflated money entering the market at the top does not simply redistribute downwards; it strips the selling club of its best asset and hands back cash into a market whose prices that same money has already pushed up. City’s spending power, as the panel’s figures make plain, raised fees and wages across the board — including the fees the sellers then had to pay.
Where this leaves the ledger
City’s annual gross spend did not climb steadily so much as step up in line with the sponsorship income later found to be disguised: £53.32m in 2012-13, £179.43m in 2015-16, £186.13m in 2016-17, £273.27m in 2017-18. In 2016-17, only 8% of £140.59m of booked sponsorship revenue came from genuine sponsors.
None of the selling clubs broke a rule, and none face any jeopardy — there is no mechanism in football for clawing back a transfer fee because the buyer’s accounts were later found to be false. That is precisely the problem facing the separate sanctions hearing still to come. The seven trophies City won in the period — three Premier Leagues, an FA Cup and three League Cups — were built on a squad assembled from these deals, and no Premier League title has ever been stripped. The live domestic precedent is points deductions, as applied to Everton and Nottingham Forest in 2023-24, which punish a present squad for a past breach.
City say they are “disappointed and surprised” and will pursue the appeal avenues open to them, with Ferran Soriano arguing the case rests on “a single false accusation”. Whatever the commission decides on punishment, the £830m has long since dispersed into nine years of transfer fees — and the clubs that received it mostly have little left to show.
Sports journalist and editor at SportsPortal.net. Covers cricket, football, Formula 1, tennis, and basketball with a focus on how global sports connect with Pakistani audiences. Follows the PSL, Pakistan national cricket team, Premier League, and major international tournaments. Has reported on sports for digital audiences since 2021.
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