Man City's Insane Spending

[devlinadl]

Knock off £2.1bn for your £150m a year even since 2008 and it’s still lucrative.. we might have invested big but the value and quality of the squad today absolutely represents that. What’s your excuse?

OK, how about adding back the £80-100m a year in costs that they hive up to the holding company? No other sporting organisation in the world apportions costs the way City does, and it is done solely to artificially make City satisfy FFP.

Still not there? How about all the shady off-balance sheet stuff they do, such as selling worthless image rights to connected parties or the tourism ambassadorships they give out in lieu of salary? We don't know how much much is involved, because we only find out when it leaks, but I am willing to bet that there is much much more that has not coming out.

You keep talking about the value of City increasing, but my point is that is based on Abu Dhabi artificially raising revenue, lowering costs and also doing dodgy/illegal stuff off-balance sheet. Without all that support, City would be massively loss-making and either go into insolvency or be worth about the same as Leeds (circa £200m).

 

[SilentWitness]

Personally I think the recruitment this summer is immense from them. If they bring in Haaland, Alvarez, Phillips and Cucurella and shift out Sterling, Jesus and Zinchenko that would be fantastic for them. They will spend around 150m and bring in around 100m. That’s outstanding recruitment when you consider the calibre of players they’re signing.

 

[Regulus Arcturus Black]

. They will spend around 150m and bring in around 100m.

Gullible much? As if Haaland is costing anything like that.

 

[SilentWitness]

Gullible much? As if Haaland is costing anything like that.

51m initial transfer fee, no?

 

[Godfather]

Scary to think what Pep might do with that squad now. They've done some really good business again.

 

[Sandikan]

51m initial transfer fee, no?

And 20k a week right?

 

[Sandikan]

Scary to think we Pep might do with that squad now. They've done some really good business again.

Yeah scary to think that erm...they might dominate the league league they've dominated for years anyway. Again.

People were getting worried at Liverpool moving past our league titles, I think City will get there first.
But everyone knows it's not be taken seriously.

 

[SilentWitness]

And 20k a week right?

Im talking about transfer spend, not wages and agency fees. I know it’s difficult for you lot to give praise to their transfer business because you’ve been as shite as us at it but you can’t pick and choose which transfers to add agent fees and wage expenditure to just to suit your arguments.

+ even if you use that argument, the ability of City to get big fees for their players and offset their wages at the same time frees up money to spend on those agent fees and wages due to being a successful club.

We all know they’ve bought the position they’re in but other clubs have had money and spunked it away stupidly. City are an extremely well run football club from management level to board level and they’re not going to disappear after Pep.

 

[Sandikan]

Im talking about transfer spend, not wages and agency fees. I know it’s difficult for you lot to give praise to their transfer business because you’ve been as shite as us at it but you can’t pick and choose which transfers to add agent fees and wage expenditure to just to suit your arguments.

+ even if you use that argument, the ability of City to get big fees for their players and offset their wages at the same time frees up money to spend on those agent fees and wages due to being a successful club.

We all know they’ve bought the position they’re in but other clubs have had money and spunked it away stupidly. City are an extremely well run football club from management level to board level and they’re not going to disappear after Pep.

Calm your chops. We're only larking around.
Only a halfwit thinks they're going anywhere. I only just wrote a post saying I think they'll hit 21 league titles before Liverpool do (and us!).

I think Liverpool are the ones who are propped up by their manager.

In future I think it'll be City and Newcastle top 2 then whichever of the rest are currently best managed and run for the other 2 places.
But I think there's been talk of 5 champions league places already to counter it.

 

[BerryBerryShrew]

Im talking about transfer spend, not wages and agency fees. I know it’s difficult for you lot to give praise to their transfer business because you’ve been as shite as us at it but you can’t pick and choose which transfers to add agent fees and wage expenditure to just to suit your arguments.

In fairness, in the modern game if you are paying significantly below market value for a top player in terms of transfer fee, then you are making up the shortfall somewhere else- be it in agent fees, wages and most significantly of all: signing on bonus. Haaland would certainly have gotten an astronomical signing on fee (possibly 100m+) and that should be referenced in terms of transfer spend. I mean, if Real had signed Mbappé would you have described it as a "free" transfer given that they were going to have to throw something like €200m at him before even discussing his wage?

 

[R'hllor]

copium is strong in this thread.

 

[redcucumber]

The hilarious thing is we'll be having this exact same conversation about Newcastle in 10 years. Abu Dhabi FC vs. Saudi Arabia FC. Exciting stuff.

 

[SilentWitness]

In fairness, in the modern game if you are paying significantly below market value for a top player in terms of transfer fee, then you are making up the shortfall somewhere else- be it in agent fees, wages and most significantly of all: signing on bonus. Haaland would certainly have gotten an astronomical signing on fee (possibly 100m+) and that should be referenced in terms of transfer spend. I mean, if Real had signed Mbappé would you have described it as a "free" transfer given that they were going to have to throw something like €200m at him before even discussing his wage?

Do people reference signing on fees when they talk about Pogba, Maguire etc? No, of course they don’t.

 

[Josh 76]

Personally I think the recruitment this summer is immense from them. If they bring in Haaland, Alvarez, Phillips and Cucurella and shift out Sterling, Jesus and Zinchenko that would be fantastic for them. They will spend around 150m and bring in around 100m. That’s outstanding recruitment when you consider the calibre of players they’re signing.

I think pep will want to keep Zinchenko.

Walker/ Zinchenko
Stones / Laporte/ Diaz / Ake
Cancelo / Cucurella

Rodri / Phillips
Debryne/ Silva / Gundogan

Grealish/ Foden/ Mahrez / Sterling ?

Haaland / Alvarez /Palmer

Thats squad depth on another level!

 

[Idxomer]

Do people reference signing on fees when they talk about Pogba, Maguire etc? No, of course they don’t.

What they've paid Haaland and his gang is pretty unusual. People have mentioned the fees Juventus paid Raiola when he transferred Pogba to United, same with someone like Neymar when he made his move to Barca or Mbappe when he renewed his contract a few weeks ago.

I also don't believe they've only paid Dortmund as little as 51m but that's another matter.

 

[Ish]

That's your take away from this?

 

[marktan]

Do people reference signing on fees when they talk about Pogba, Maguire etc? No, of course they don’t.

But they do include agent fees, which the £89m figure for Pogba did. Like 20m or so went to Raiola.

Halaand is £50m fee + something like £40m in agent fees, for some reason everyone's going with £50m as the fee. I get why City would throw that out as the fee, but why a lot of the public have accepted that is beyond me.

 

[Ish]

City need a striker: they bought a striker
Fernandinho leaving: bought his replacement as a DM backup
Jesus and possibly Sterling leaving: bought his replacement

The only superfluous purchase here seems to be the LB from Brighton.

Think the LB target is a response to Mendy’s career being down the shitter. Competition for Zinchenko, meaning Cancelo and Walker will probably rotate on the right. But yeah, agreed, Cancelo was fine as a LB as well. 2 quality players for each position, I guess.

 

[devlinadl]

What they've paid Haaland and his gang is pretty unusual. People have mentioned the fees Juventus paid Raiola when he transferred Pogba to United, same with someone like Neymar when he made his move to Barca or Mbappe when he renewed his contract a few weeks ago.

I also don't believe they've only paid Dortmund as little as 51m but that's another matter.

Exactly. Juventus received much less that the £89m that United paid for Pogba because they had to pay the agents fees to Raiola. Ditto Porto and Nunes (the £64m upfront included the agents fees that Porto has to pay).

Also the agents fees for Haaland were massively inflated because the release fee was so low. This was all planned by Raiola years before. Plus you normally don’t have to put the player‘s dad tens of millions in order to seal the deal.

 

[Zen86]

Scary to think what Pep might do with that squad now. They've done some really good business again.

Pep has never had anything shy of the best squad in the league, so it doesn’t really make much difference. I couldn’t really care less if they added Mbappe and a few others to it. They’re just a soulless club steamrolling an increasingly pointless sport.

 

[Acrobat7]

I also don't believe they've only paid Dortmund as little as 51m but that's another matter.

Dortmund is listed on the stock exchange so they would have to declare if they received more. Otherwise it would be securities fraud.

 

[Rhyme Animal]

City’s spending seems very sane to me…

 

[Bestietom]

Personally I think the recruitment this summer is immense from them. If they bring in Haaland, Alvarez, Phillips and Cucurella and shift out Sterling, Jesus and Zinchenko that would be fantastic for them. They will spend around 150m and bring in around 100m. That’s outstanding recruitment when you consider the calibre of players they’re signing.

They are getting better and better whilst we are getting worse. Years and Years ahead of us now.

 

[leontas]

This is a tiring narrative. We’ve spend more than City in the last 5 years and yet have nothing to show for it. We just have to accept we’ve spent the money poorly on marquee signings that may have fit one manager’s plans but not the subsequent one.

 

[ExecutionerWasp001]

Not quite true. FFP aren’t standard business rules and debt doesn’t tell us anything. Even using your logic, it’d be a completely viable business and actually very lucrative…

City were bought for £210m in 2008, and they’ve since sold a 13% Stake to a Chinese consortium in 2015 for £265m, and then a 10% Stake to Silver Lake in 2019 for £390m. The latest valuation (let’s use Forbes May 2022) is £3.4bn so the owners remaining 77% stake is now worth £2.6bn.

When you add it all up the £210m investment has now returned a total of £3.25bn to date, Even if you discount all revenue that the club brings in and assume the £1bn transfer spend was entirely self-funding by the owners, it’s not been too bad for them has it... would certainly still exist.

You do realise that Abu Dhabi have already invested £2 Billion into Silverlake. In effect Silverlake have been given a free 10% stake in CFG & they have more than £1.5 Billion of your owners money sitting in their pockets. Nice business if you can get it. They haven't had to invest a bean in the club. It makes no difference to them whether you are profitable or not as they are still sitting on a huge pile of your owners cash.

It's very hard to quantify the China deal as they are a very secretive people. What most would agree on is that they are not the type of people to be mugged off. They are not going to invest £265 Mill in a loss making venture which shows no path to profitability.

Where does the £210 Mill figure come from? The club may have been bought for £210 Mill but Abu Dhabi have invested Billions more into transfers, wages & infrastructure. If City were put on the market tomorrow their worth would be calculated by valuing assets & revenue streams. When this was done you would be well short of returning Abu Dhabi's investment let alone the fictitious investors.

 

[Ayoba]

This has to be a troll, right? I mean I get that there are loads of younger fans but no united fan can possibly think of us having 13 league titles instead of 20.

Calm down, I meant PL titles.

 

[Adisa]

We complain about their spending. City will sell Jesus for 50m and Sterling for 40m. Net, they will spend less than us again.

 

[MongeySpangle]

The difference between City and the non oil clubs is they not only have ridiculous financial backing but their failures in the tranafer market just simply don't matter, it does not effect them. Not only that but their investment is seemingly never ending and uncapped.

Other clubs do not have this benefit. It's easy to run a club well with such advantages.

You could make that argument if we had as many failures in the market as the rest of the clubs, but we don't. Of all the players that we've signed in the time Guardiola has been here how many could you honestly say have flopped? Mendy, Nolito and probably Angelino. I will not accept Grealish as one because he's only been with us one season and has shown considerable progression throughout the course of the year and I'm confident he will get better next season.

 

[MongeySpangle]

And 20k a week right?

And Ronaldo is on a Freddo and a packet of crisps every week isn't he. But 15 million! Bargain!

 

[Beachryan]

We complain about their spending. City will sell Jesus for 50m and Sterling for 40m. Net, they will spend less than us again.

Ah net spend. So they got those two players for free then?

I believe we've outspent City in one or maybe two transfer windows out of the last 20 or so, if you include the winter window.

Everyone rightly mocks us for having bought Maguire for 80m. But no one talks about City's back line, which was typically Cancelo (60m) Stones (50m) Laporte (57m) and Walker (45m), sitting in front of Ederson (35m) and protected by Rodri (68m). Oh and if anything goes wrong, there's always Dias (60m) and Ake (40m) sitting on the bench. And now Kalvin Philips in case something happens to Rodri.

Pep has made an amazing team, but he has not done so 'sensibly' or in any way grounded in the reality most clubs have to be.

 

[BerryBerryShrew]

Do people reference signing on fees when they talk about Pogba, Maguire etc? No, of course they don’t.

Because they were signed for way above their market values. It's unlikely that (incompetent as we are) we offered them huge signing fees on top of the already excessive transfer fees as well. Haaland went for a great deal less than what he would have fetched without a release clause. Do you really think that Raiola (or any agent for that matter) would not leverage that into a large one off payment to the player? Once again, see Mbappé for reference. A year ago, Real offered €200m odd for him. If PSG had accepted, then Mbappé would not have been getting a substantial signing on fee. A month ago, they could have signed him for free so instead they were offering Mbappé the €200m as a signing on bonus instead.

Likewise, If Haaland is worth £150m and they sign him for £50m then it's not unreasonable to presume that the difference found it's way into Erling's bank account - if not then his agent (whoever he has replaced Raiola with) has done a terrible job.

 

[MongeySpangle]

I believe we've outspent City in one or maybe two transfer windows out of the last 20 or so, if you include the winter window.

Everyone rightly mocks us for having bought Maguire for 80m. But no one talks about City's back line, which was typically Cancelo (60m) Stones (50m) Laporte (57m) and Walker (45m), sitting in front of Ederson (35m) and protected by Rodri (68m). Oh and if anything goes wrong, there's always Dias (60m) and Ake (40m) sitting on the bench. And now Kalvin Philips in case something happens to Rodri.

Pep has made an amazing team, but he has not done so 'sensibly' or in any way grounded in the reality most clubs have to be.

You know, there's this thing called proving your worth. Which all of the City players you mentioned here have done. All of them have performed much better than Maguire has for United, I don't think anyone could even try to argue that. The four centre backs you mention cost 200m in total as you have highlighted. I would rather have spent that money on four great centre backs than the 80m you spent on one who probably wouldn't even make our bench.

Also, you've conveniently forgotten to mention the 50m you spent on Wan-Bissaka, the 40m you spent on Varane, the 20m you spent on Dalot, the 30m you spent on Lindelof, the 16m on Telles and the 35m you spent on Bailly and Shaw apiece. Including Maguire that's a 306m backline compared to our 380m one (excluding Ederson). Is that extra 74m the reason we've won eleven trophies since you last won one?

Ah net spend. So they got those two players for free then?

No, we didn't. But I don't think you're in a position to complain about this too much after you've just let a player who you spent 90m on leave on a free for the SECOND TIME.

 

[Mb194dc]

They don't pay massively over the odds often, just Grealish that I can think of. He's been bought for marketing reasons seemingly as much as for football though.

All the players are bought for Peps system, makes a big difference.

They also have no interest in even breaking even let alone profitability. Obviously clubs that want to be financially self sustaining have no chance against that in the long run. They can boost their revenue to get around the regulations...

It'll be a shock if they don't walk the league next year.

 

[MongeySpangle]

Ah net spend. So they got those two players for free then?

I believe we've outspent City in one or maybe two transfer windows out of the last 20 or so, if you include the winter window.

Everyone rightly mocks us for having bought Maguire for 80m. But no one talks about City's back line, which was typically Cancelo (60m) Stones (50m) Laporte (57m) and Walker (45m), sitting in front of Ederson (35m) and protected by Rodri (68m). Oh and if anything goes wrong, there's always Dias (60m) and Ake (40m) sitting on the bench. And now Kalvin Philips in case something happens to Rodri.

Pep has made an amazing team, but he has not done so 'sensibly' or in any way grounded in the reality most clubs have to be.

I've also just realised I included Rodri in that. Let's take him out and that makes it 312m! Or we could just add the 53m you paid for Fred to your bill instead? Whichever works better for you.

 

[Amar__]

Anyone who believes figures posted for any player they buy and their wages is insane, I bet in majority cases half of that should be added on top of the released figures, that goes through off shore accounts, sponsorships, and things like that.

 

[Sandikan]

Ah net spend. So they got those two players for free then?

I believe we've outspent City in one or maybe two transfer windows out of the last 20 or so, if you include the winter window.

Everyone rightly mocks us for having bought Maguire for 80m. But no one talks about City's back line, which was typically Cancelo (60m) Stones (50m) Laporte (57m) and Walker (45m), sitting in front of Ederson (35m) and protected by Rodri (68m). Oh and if anything goes wrong, there's always Dias (60m) and Ake (40m) sitting on the bench. And now Kalvin Philips in case something happens to Rodri.

Pep has made an amazing team, but he has not done so 'sensibly' or in any way grounded in the reality most clubs have to be.

The refusal to accept context of spending is always quite staggering.

Some fans have even rewritten history to try and argue that City didn't already have the best squad when Pep rolled in and started whopping 50m figures on defenders before it became popular.

 

[Polar]

… and United spend £50-60m more on wages (annual)

 

[Rajiztar]

… and United spend £50-60m more on wages (annual)

That's real achievement from Ed woody.Should have sacked him after Moyes disastrous spell season especially after signing players like fellaini.

 

[Mastadon]

Personally I think the recruitment this summer is immense from them. If they bring in Haaland, Alvarez, Phillips and Cucurella and shift out Sterling, Jesus and Zinchenko that would be fantastic for them. They will spend around 150m and bring in around 100m. That’s outstanding recruitment when you consider the calibre of players they’re signing.

Their recruitment in general has been absolutely spot on. Sure they have spent huge money but you don’t see them making the kind of mistakes Chelsea did after they hit the lottery by signing the likes of Torres, Shevchenko or more recently Lukaku. They generally get great value for their signings with a few exceptions like Mangala or whatever his name is.

I guess having owners that hire the best people in the business to handle their affairs and don’t insist on interfering to sign whoever they feel like has really worked out well for them. You would never see City schpunking 100 mil+ on a Coutinho or Hazard type to their credit.

 

[thegregster]

… and United spend £50-60m more on wages (annual)

Not true. Just look at the official accounts.


These numbers are according to Martyn Ziegler, via Companies House, and they offer an insight into which clubs are overachieving and which are underachieving this season.

1. Manchester City - £355m
2. Chelsea - £343m
3. Manchester United - £323m
4. Liverpool - £314m
5. Arsenal - £244m
6. Tottenham Hotspur - £205m

https://www.marca.com/en/football/premier-league/2022/03/06/622504ab22601d94458b458e.html