Man City's 'inflated' spending: which clubs benefited from £1.2bn of transfers
October 3, 2026 01:01
Analysis of Manchester City's transfer activity between summer 2009 and winter 2018 shows the club spent roughly £1.2bn on players in that period (about £900m net). An independent commission later found the club had "inflated" its accounts by more than £900m; that finding and an announced appeal prompted defenders to argue the cash made many other clubs richer.
THE SPREAD OF THE MONEY
BBC Sport compiled a list of every club to which City paid transfer fees for senior players in that timeframe (excluding free transfers, loans and academy graduates). The outlay reached clubs across Europe's top leagues. Just over a quarter of City's total transfer spending went to clubs in the English top flight. City signed players from eight Premier League clubs and from the same number of La Liga sides.
WHAT TRANSFER SPENDING COVERS
Transfer figures include more than the headline fee for a player: agent fees, legal and administrative costs and signing-on payments mean money from those deals reached a range of intermediaries and organisations behind the scenes, making precise flows difficult to track. For some recipient clubs the fees City paid were the largest they had ever received at the time.
A CASE IN POINT: WOLFSBURG
One example cited is Wolfsburg, who received the fee for Kevin De Bruyne in 2016 and then signed Julian Draxler for about half that amount, along with other signings including Dante. After the De Bruyne sale, Wolfsburg dropped from second to eighth in the Bundesliga and then narrowly avoided relegation in the subsequent two seasons.
WHY IT MATTERS
Supporters of City have argued the club's spending redistributed money around the game. The BBC analysis illustrates how wide that redistribution was, while the independent commission's findings have focused attention on whether the scale and source of that spending breached the rules.