Manchester City's breaches cost rivals real money, but the bill is unknowable

Key takeaways

• The BBC reports that the possible effects of Manchester City's rule breaking reach Champions League qualification, relegation and the share-out of Premier League prize money.
• In a closed league with a fixed number of places, any club that finishes higher than it should pushes at least one other club down, and each place lost has a price.
• Lost European qualification does the most lasting damage, because revenue from one season pays for the squad that competes in the next.
• To say how much any one club lost, you would need to know how City would have performed without the breaches, and nobody can know that.

Rival clubs lost out, though nobody can say exactly how much

The BBC reports that the possible consequences of Manchester City's rule breaking reach deep into the Premier League. They touch Champions League qualification, relegation and the way the league's prize money is divided. This article argues that those consequences are real but cannot be measured precisely. Both parts of that sentence matter.

The logic starts with how a league table works. The Premier League has a fixed number of clubs and a fixed number of places. Nobody can be added to the top without someone being moved down. If a club reaches a position partly through breaking the rules, the gain does not come from nowhere. It is taken from the clubs that would otherwise have stood where it stands, and that displacement can run some way down the table.

That is why leagues have financial rules at all. They rest on the idea that money turns into results: wages and transfer fees buy better players, and better players win more matches. If a club spends or reports money in ways the rules forbid, the logic of the regulations holds that competition has been distorted. On that view, a breach is not a private accounting matter between a club and its regulator. It moves opportunity away from everyone else.

The trouble is that this transfer cannot be seen. A league table records what happened. It cannot record what would have happened if the rules had been followed. So the honest position has three parts. Rival clubs were plausibly harmed as a group. The ways they were harmed are well understood. How much any single club lost is not known, and may never be.

Prize money follows league position, so every place moved has a price

The clearest evidence is how the Premier League pays its clubs. Central income, mostly from broadcasting, is split into several parts. Some is shared equally among all clubs whatever happens on the pitch. Some is paid according to how often a club's matches are chosen for live broadcast. Some is a merit payment that rises with each place a club finishes in the table.

The merit payment is what makes the harm countable in principle. Every place in the final table has a set value, and each place is worth more than the one below it. If a club finished one place lower than it would have done in a fair competition, it lost the gap between those two payments. That sum is real money, paid out at the end of the season. It does not depend on anyone's view of the club's long-term prospects.

The effect also spreads. Imagine that a club which broke the rules would have finished several places lower without the advantage. Every club between its actual position and that lower one would then have moved up a place. Each of them lost one step of merit payment, so the cost falls on a band of clubs rather than one. The broadcast-selection money follows a similar if looser pattern. Clubs challenging near the top are more likely to be picked for live coverage, so a club pushed out of contention may also lose some of that income.

This is the strongest strand of the argument because the mechanism is written into the league's own distribution model. It still needs one thing that cannot be observed: where City would actually have finished. The amount for each place is known. Which places changed hands is not.

European qualification multiplies the effect beyond one season

The second piece of evidence is European qualification. The BBC names missed Champions League qualification as one of the possible effects, and it is the most important. Qualifying through league position brings income from several directions at once. It includes prize money from the European governing body, a share of European broadcast revenue, extra home matches with their gate receipts and hospitality, and commercial bonuses. Sponsorship and kit deals often pay more when a club plays in Europe's top competition.

What makes this harm larger than the domestic prize money is that it builds on itself. A club that qualifies has more income the following season. It can offer higher wages, compete for better players and present itself to them as a club that plays in Europe. A club that misses out loses all of that at once, and the gap can widen over later seasons.

Financial regulation adds a further twist. Many cost controls in modern football link permitted spending to a club's legitimate revenue. A club that missed European income it might otherwise have earned therefore had its spending limit lowered as well. The rules that were meant to protect fair competition would, in that case, have cut the spending power of the very clubs that were displaced. That does not show any particular club was harmed. It does show why a single missed qualification can matter for years rather than months.

The weakness here is the same as with prize money, only stronger. European places are decided by small margins at the boundary. Whether a particular club would have crossed it in a counterfactual season is not known.

Relegation turns a single place into the largest swing of all

The third strand runs to the bottom of the table. The BBC lists relegation among the possible effects, and in money terms relegation is the biggest swing in English football. A relegated club loses its share of Premier League central income. It drops into a division where broadcast income is far lower. It usually has to cut its wage bill or sell players to stay solvent. The Premier League pays transitional sums, usually called parachute payments, to relegated clubs. They soften the fall but do not replace what is lost.

How a club at the top could affect relegation is less obvious than how it affects the race for Europe, and it should be stated carefully. One route runs through matches. A club near the bottom that loses to a side built partly in breach of the rules may have lost points it could otherwise have taken. Another route runs through the transfer market. A club spending beyond legitimate limits pushes up wages and fees across the league, and that raises the cost of survival for everyone else. Neither route proves anything about a particular club. Both explain why relegation appears on the list of possible harms.

This strand carries the highest stakes and the weakest proof. A single place at the boundary separates staying up from going down. Relegation battles are often settled by fine margins. But tracing those margins back to one rival's financial conduct means stacking several assumptions on top of each other.

The counterfactual cannot be run, and that weakens every claim

The strongest case against this article's argument deserves a fair hearing, and it is a serious one.

First, it is impossible to replay the seasons. Every claim of harm depends on knowing how Manchester City would have performed without the breaches. That depends on choices about coaching, recruitment and squad building which would have played out differently in ways no one can model. City might have finished in much the same positions through legitimate investment and good management. If so, the displacement described above never happened, and no rival lost a place.

Second, a rule breach is not automatically a sporting advantage. Financial rules cover many things: how income is recorded, how costs are reported, how far a club cooperates with its regulator. A breach of reporting or disclosure rules may not change how much was spent on players at all. Whether, and how far, each breach turned into extra spending power is a factual question. It cannot be assumed.

Third, other clubs' results have their own causes. A club that missed European qualification or was relegated may have done so because of its own decisions, its own spending, its own managerial changes or plain bad luck. Blaming its fate on one rival ignores everything else that shapes a season.

Fourth, the knock-on effects are not neat. If City had finished lower, the clubs around them would not simply have shuffled up one place each. Every season is a web of results between all the clubs, and changing one strand changes others unpredictably.

Finally, punishing the club that broke the rules does not automatically compensate anyone else. Whatever sanction a regulator imposes, it is a separate matter whether the clubs below receive any money. Whether any club will seek compensation, and how such a claim would be judged, is not known.

Evidence that would sharpen or overturn the conclusion

Several developments could change this assessment. The most useful would be a detailed account from the body that judged the case. It would need to set out which breaches were proven, what money was involved, and whether that money went into wages and transfers or into how figures were presented. Breaches that clearly increased spending on the squad would strengthen the case for real sporting harm. Breaches limited to reporting would weaken it.

A sanction that formally changed past finishing positions or redistributed prize money would turn this question from estimate into record. Any compensation claim by a rival club, and its result, would show how a formal process weighs causation. Independent economic modelling with openly stated assumptions could narrow the range of plausible losses, even if it could never fix one figure.

None of these is known to be underway. Until they are, the defensible conclusion stands: the harm was probably real and widely spread, and its size for any single club cannot be known.

Sources and further reading

• BBC Sport: reporting on the possible effects of Manchester City's rule breaking on European qualification, relegation and prize money
• Premier League handbook: the league's published rules on central distribution, merit payments and financial regulation
• UEFA: published information on how club competition revenue is distributed
• Football finance research from accountancy firms and academic sports economists on how money translates into results