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LONDON: Between 2010 and 2016 Manchester City spent €1.02 billion ($1.3 billion) on transfer fees. According to a study by the CIES Football Observatory this was the largest gross investment of its type in world football — 18 percent higher than Chelsea, 22 percent more than Manchester United, 36 percent above Barcelona, and 44 percent ahead of Real Madrid.
In Pep Guardiola’s first season as City manager, CIES put his new club’s commitments to transfer fees at €231 million — an English Premier League record. So far this season, the Neuchatel-based academics have them at €282 million.
On Guardiola’s instruction, City’s director of football, Txiki Begiristain, has been working to complete two more first-team signings before Wednesday’s winter window deadline. Athletic Bilbao defender Aymeric Laporte will cost €70 million in transfer fees and Shakhtar Donetsk midfielder Fred at least €40 million.
If Begiristain succeeds in adding that pair to a squad that is already 12 points clear in the league, City’s commitments to transfer fees in the 19 months since Guardiola started work will exceed €620 million. The figure for this season alone will be touching €400 million; in the region of a 50 percent increase on the Abu Dhabi-owned club’s past high-watermark.
The scale and velocity of the investment during Guardiola’s time there is underlined by a comparison with the transfer fees paid by Manchester United under Sir Alex Ferguson. During the Scot’s 21 campaigns as a Premier League manager, United’s gross spend came to €650 million at current exchange rates; barely greater than the cash pile Guardiola has burned through in less than two.
More relevant is the head-to-head comparison with the Catalan’s cross-city rival. According to the same CIES study, United’s transfer fee commitments since Jose Mourinho’s appointment stand at €382 million. In other words, City want to push over the line two deals that will increase their liabilities on transfer fees in a single season above the total incurred by United in four windows under Mourinho’s management.
Guardiola either has not looked
at these numbers, or he does not care. Last week he delivered the following defense of the expenditure which has contributed to the quality of his team’s football. “Of course we spent a lot of money,” Guardiola said. “But the same money as a lot of teams. We’re not the only team in the world that spends money. There are many.”
The Catalan expanded on an argument that City’s spend remained insufficient for the purposes of competing “at a high level in all four competitions”, indicating that — until now — he had actually been handicapped in the quality of players Abu Dhabi had allowed him to add to his squad.
“We have not paid for one player 100 million or 90 million or 80 million,” he said. “We cannot pay right now, they tell me, we cannot. And the salaries, we cannot pay. That is the truth. Maybe in the future it’s going to happen.”
Guardiola is correct that City have yet to commit more than €75 million to a transfer fee. It is also true that recent attempts to recruit Neymar, Kylian Mbappe and Lionel Messi fell through because Paris Saint-Germain outbid them for the first two, while the latter used City’s interest to extract an unprecedented pay package from Barcelona.
His complaint on salaries, however, came in a month in which City added to a slew of recent contract renewals by upgrading Kevin De Bruyne’s to one which guarantees the Belgian £265,000 ($328,000) a week. Including easily attainable bonuses it will pay over £300,000 a week in a normal season, and could reach £400,000 a week in an exceptional one.
The contracts City offer players have an unusually large performance-related component; one reason why you can expect its wage bill to reach a record level for a Premier League club this season. For 2016-17, City reported salary costs of £264.1 million on revenue of £473.4 million. United’s salary costs were £263.4 million on revenue of £581 million.
Although City’s annual report was prepared on a 13-month basis and thus their annualized wage bill lower than United’s, the numbers are for a season in which Guardiola won nothing, whereas Mourinho delivered a Europa League and League Cup double. Once performance-related bonuses are triggered, and once the lucrative new contracts agreed this season have been factored in, City’s spending on player wages will also surpass United’s (which last season still included Wayne Rooney’s bloated pay).
All of this excludes the five other football clubs owned wholly or in part by City Football Group and which Abu Dhabi can use to recruit promising footballers off the books of their most important footballing asset with a view to moving them to City at a later date. Of their domestic rivals only Chelsea have an operation (via Vitesse Arnhem) even vaguely similar.
With UEFA drawing the crosshairs of a new Financial Fair Play system toward Abu Dhabi and Qatar’s two football clubs it is little wonder that City have grown touchy about mention of their finances. The football Guardiola has delivered this season has been exceptional. He does himself and his employers few favors, though, by trying to pretend it has not been delivered with the aid of the most voracious spend in the history of the sport.