It helped teams everywhere and especially in the Premier League. These have been some of the arguments used by those backing Manchester City in the media and online since the verdicts declaring the club guilty came in and an appeal was announced. The suggestion is that there was a net benefit to the game as a whole, and in particular the clubs to whom Manchester City paid big transfer fees.
The more than £900m by which the independent commission found the club had "inflated" its accounts was not all spent on transfer fees. Clubs have many bills, including wages for players and other staff, utilities, insurance, infrastructure costs, commercial fees and much more. But the roughly £1.2bn Man City spent on players between 2009-2018 (about £900m net spend) was more than anybody else in that period.
That outlay was vital in making them England's most successful club, and would surely have been heavily reduced had they not knowingly broken the rules, as the independent commission concluded. So where did City's money flow to in the transfer market, and what impact did it have? Man City confirm appeal against guilty verdict Man City whistleblower to lose witness protection The amount required to sign the player is the most obvious, but there are also agents fees, legal expenses, administration money and potentially signing-on bonuses.
That means the money dished out by Manchester City during the 'asterisk era' will have reached people and bodies who work in the background of football deal-making and is difficult to track. But what can be done is analysis of the fundamental interactions between City and other clubs. Below is a list of every club to whom Manchester City paid transfer fees between summer 2009 and winter 2018, in descending order from the most money to the least.
The list is for senior players and does not include free transfers, loans or academy graduates. That is 46 different clubs in 19 national league systems. For some of them, the fees paid by City were the highest the clubs had ever received at the time.
Looking at the spread of money among clubs demonstrates just how far and wide Manchester City's money was spent. The split in money spent on transfer fees by City during the timeframe is relatively even across some of the highest-ranked leagues in Europe, though the Premier League is higher than any other. Just over a quarter of their total transfer outlay was paid to clubs in the English top flight.
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