A couple of weeks ago, following the news that Manchester City had been guilty of exactly the kind of financial doping we could all see with our eyes, I speculated that they must’ve cost English clubs billions of pounds since the 2009/10 season. Turns out back-of-the envelop speculation was correct.
I did the math(s).
I can prove it.
Manchester City cheated other English clubs out of at least £2 billion from the 2009/10 season onward.
Methodology
I’ll once again start with a few caveats: I’m not an accountant, and
my spreadsheet skills are pretty mid, to be honest. So, I did the best I could, but I think I did well to get a good sense of their cheating, even if I didn’t precisely nail the exact dollar (or quid) amount.
I would also like to note that this is probably a significant underestimation of the true cost, as we’ll see below. I took a conservative route, one based on what we know for sure. There are a ton of costs that are unknowable. For example, a lot of sponsorship deals have bonuses for Champions League qualification, or winning trophies, etc. I didn’t account for that, and certainly not in the differences between a club like Liverpool—with significant commericial bonuses—and smaller clubs like Spurs or Arsenal (I kid, I kid…sort of). Moreover, not qualifying for a tournament or the next round of the tournament will obviously have knock-on effects, including extra revenue from ticket sales, extra revenue from potentially advancing even further, etc. Again, I didn’t take this into consideration, either.
With commercial deals and all the unknowns, I almost certainly significantly underestimated what the real cost was. The point here isn’t to name an exact amount, but rather to highlight the sheer scale of cheating, in real, easily provable terms. Even if you disagree with some of my methodology (see below), I think it’s difficult to argue in good faith that the true cost wasn’t in the billions.
So what did I use to calculate?
Domestic Cups
In the domestic cups, I used the prize money that each club would’ve earned, had they advanced to the next round and not been knocked out by Manchester City. And boy, City’s body count is high in the domestic cups. I’ll save that for another article. Although the prize money has changed over time, I used the 2025/26 figures, because I wasn’t going to fuck around, looking into the prize money for each and every year since 2009. The sums are also low enough that I think this gives us a good sense what City cost these clubs, especially when counting for inflation. I subtracted the difference between losing in a round and advancing, and assigned each club the value of that difference.
Premier League Places
This is probably my most controversial call. You can either agree or disagree. I don’t care. In most cases, if an athlete is caught cheating, they are disqualified from the event. Which means their results don’t count, as if they never competed, and they finished dead last.
I have no problem considering all of City’s points, and therefore league positions, to be null and voided. In my view, this means that every time City finished above another team, they should owe that team £2.7 million. Note, that this is the current difference in prize money awarded between finishing places in the Premier League. Once again, it has changed over time, and once again I am not fucking around with that. Something something, inflation, something, close enough.
Relegation
This was the easiest to calculate, but once again almost certainly an underestimation. Since we have a very recent example of Burnley suing Everton for £35 million, I can just use this number as a basis going forward. It’s probably low, but since a legal precedent has been set, this is the number I’m going to use and probably the most accurate assumption I’m making here.
What I was not going to do was go through every season with a magnifying glass, determining who exactly got relegated because of their results against City compared to the teams around them. As I said, City should now be put on the bottom of every single league season since 2009/10, and therefore whoever finished 18 deserves compensation in my book.
European Qualification
Again, this is certainly an underestimation, but I am just using the prize money for qualifying for the group/league phases of these tournaments. Once again from the most recent season. Anyway, it’s £40 million for Champions League Qualification, £3.86 million for Europa League, and £2.71 for Europa Conference League. When including things like sponsorship bonuses, ticket sales, etc, failing to qualify for the Champions League could easily cost a team like Liverpool more than double that amount. But I’m taking the conservative route here.
The Cost of Cheating
Domestic Cups
Although this is one of the “lighter” categories, cost-wise, many of the victims were lower-league teams, who would’ve massively benefitted in any season—both financially and for the overall joy in their respective fanbases—had they not run smack dab into the financial doping juggernaut that is Manchester City.
By my calculations, City cost English teams £14,440,000 through eliminations in the FA Cup, and an additional £525,000 in the League Cup. Along the way, the eliminated 32 teams at least once in the League Cup, and 40 teams at least once in the FA Cup. A few unlucky teams like Sheffield Wednesday and Scunthorpe United got eliminated by City in both competitions in the same season. As I said earlier, City have an impressive body count (using the term as you would for Dexter Morgan, not Wilt Chamberlain).
Total League Cup and FA Cup Damages: £14,965,000
Premier League Places
Manchester City finished above other teams a combined 305 (!) times since 2009/10. And pour one out for our brothers in the blue half of Merseyside, they were the only team who were in the league the whole time and never once finished above City. Liverpool, on the other hand, only finished above City in seasons where they won the league.
The damages—death by a thousand cuts for the teams, past and present, in the Premier League—represents the single biggest single contributor to the total. It is also, in many ways, the most damning. It is an indication of the constant downward pressure that City’s financial doping exerted on the league, and therefore the entire English footballing pyramid. Nearly a billion pounds in total, taken out of the hands of other clubs, and into Manchester City’s coffers.
When looking at the list of clubs affected, there are a ton of clubs that at one point were solidly midtable—like Stoke City or West Ham—who saw their fortunes slowly begin to fade after City’s cheating, only to eventually be relegated out of the Premier League entirely. Would their fortunes have been different with tens of millions of pounds more in revenue over the years? Seems likely. Once again, the ultimate cost is impossible to know, but we know that their cheating cost other clubs nearly a billion pounds both individually and collectively, just from final Premier League position.
Total Premier League Damages: £823,500,000
Relegations
In the 15 or so years prior to City’s current ownership taking over, City were often in the relegation scrap—and indeed, were twice relegated. However, just because City’s concerns over relegation went away, it did not stop other teams from facing the drop. Seventeen teams finished 18th since 2009/10, and were therefore relegated because of City.
Total Relegation Damages: £595,000,000
European Qualification
Again, because of all the commercial aspects, and because we never know how these clubs would’ve fared in Europe (for better or worse), this is by far the murkiest of them all. Still, there are some important takeaways.
First of all, it’s hard not to see how badly teams like Spurs and Everton were screwed over by City’s cheating. They cost Spurs a total of 7 European qualifications, including 5 in the Champions League. Needless to say, the cost in pounds is likely just as bad as the reputational damage they did to Tottenham over many years. Everton were also denied their first ever Champions League qualification, and 4 Europa League qualifications. Arsenal (3) and Leicester City (2) were also cost Champions League qualification multiple times.
There is an additional, cruel twist, that both Everton and Leicester City were found guilty of their own PSR breaches, which might not have happened had they earned the extra income from multiple European qualifications. As I mentioned above with Spurs, there is also a reputational component, which is unquantifiable, but surely cost teams missing out on the Champions League a lot more over the long run.
Total European Qualification Damages: £712,430,000
Total Damages: (At Least) £2,145,895,000
I can already sense the comments that are coming my way. This is wholly inaccurate. This isn’t fair. There are problems with your methodology. Show me your crap spreadsheet skills!
I’m sure there are accountants who will be making a lot of money doing a far better job at highlighting the depth and breadth of City’s cheating than I have. Again, the point isn’t the final, exact figure. The point is that it is extraordinarily easy, even for a gobshite with mediocre Excel skills like me to come up with a figure in the billions, and to do so while almost certainly underestimating the actual cost to all the clubs in England.
Although I used the most accurate numbers I could find, and tried to be as logically consistent as possible, the best way to think about this is as a thought excercise. It’s a way of establishing a baseline, one that we know for sure, once you cut out all the other unknowns. And that is damning in and of itself.
I said in my first piece on Manchester City that the true costs were incalculable. That remains true. There are a million “what if” scenarios that could be speculated about until the heat death of the universe. But even if there are a ton of unknowns, there are things that we do know about. And we know City’s cheating cost English teams billions of pounds, and countless incredible footballing memories.
Two billion quid and 22 trophies in stolen valor. All so a human rights abusing petrostate can look a little bit better.
