Manchester City’s spending power unquestionably changed the world football transfer market – their willingness to pay higher fees and wages meant prices rose for everybody else too.
And once the world knows that a club has a wedge of cash burning a hole in its pocket courtesy of City, it can be difficult to spend it.
Asking prices may rise, and having an influx of money is no guarantee of it being well spent.
For many of the teams to whom City paid the most during this time, the money did not work out particularly beneficially.
Let’s take a look at some of the more interesting cases.
First up, Wolfsburg. They immediately signed winger Julian Draxler for about half the fee received for Kevin de Bruyne in 2016, as well as others including veteran defender Dante.
Having lost De Bruyne, they dropped from second to eighth in the Bundesliga before narrowly avoiding relegation in the subsequent two seasons.
And things did not go particularly well for second highest-ranked club Monaco either.
The most direct replacements they signed following the sales of Benjamin Mendy and Bernardo Silva in the same summer to Manchester City – Terence Kongolo and Keita Balde – did not work out in the long run, and the team went from winning Ligue 1 and reaching the Champions League semi-finals to almost being relegated within two years.
The club City purchased most players from in the 2009-18 period – Arsenal (four) – did not mount a serious Premier League title challenge during that time.
Some clubs who did not receive payments from City could also argue that the spending of money from their “inflated” accounts compromised their chances.
For example, Manchester City paid very similar totals to Benfica and Porto during the era, but nothing to Sporting, the club which makes up the big three in Portugal.
Sporting did not win a title between 2009 and 2018. There are many reasons for that, but could one of them be the fact that their direct rivals received money from City that would perhaps not have been on offer had they followed football’s financial rules?
