A football empire across five continents is being built in the name of Manchester City in Abu Dhabi.

City and its owner, City Football Group, have found a way to get around restrictions on co-owning and loaning players overseas by buying and selling talented players to affiliated clubs in other countries, which in many cases never play nationally. England, but they play an important role in the current transfer market and in the national leagues.

City Football Group, 81% controlled by the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, owns or partially controls both City and 12 other football clubs in Europe, Asia, North America, South America and Australia.

This group is the brainchild of former Barcelona Vice President Ferran Soriano. The non-English teams controlled by the group named after the city are New York in the USA, Lommel in Belgium, Troyes in France, Melbourne City in Australia, Montevideo City Torquay in Uruguay, Mumbai City in India, Girona in Spain, Sichuan Juno. in China, Palermo in Italy, Bahia in Brazil and Yokohama Marinos in Japan. He also works closely with Bolívar Club Bolivia.

It should be emphasized here that one of the 13 teams in the group, the Catalan club Girona, is based just 85 kilometers from the hometown of Manchester City coach Pep Guardiola, namely Sandpado.

In this context, Soriano’s plan to create a global football company over the 10 years of City Football Group’s work has become flesh and blood, as a multinational corporation that has its own showcase, Manchester City, as well as its own warehouses, where dozens of live soccer balls. are the “stacked” assets of the group. How is this possible?

July 2017. Crvena Zvezda midfielder Luka Ilić has just turned 18 and has been named to the national team for both the youth and junior national teams of Serbia, and has also been called up to the national team of his country. A few days ago, he made his debut in the first team of the “red-white” Belgrade in the Europa League match, when suddenly Manchester City opened the doors to the world’s top league by offering him a contract.

However, he did not play for City. He was loaned back to Crvena Zvezda for a year and then a three-year loan in the Netherlands (Brende and Twente), but he entered 2022 and never wore the Citizens blue shirt. Finally, in January 2022, he was transferred to Troyes, owned by the City Football Group (from where he was loaned out again to Batka Topolia in his hometown).

He was not the only one: along with Ilic, the Manchester City-Troyes route in 2022 was made by three more players who, having been acquired by the English team, did not play a single minute of an official match with City. These are Croat Ante Palaversa (captain of the Croatian youth team, who was sent to Troyes almost for free), Colombian Marlos Moreno and American Eric Palmer-Brown. All of them were given away by transfer, which in total could cost less than … Erling Haaland’s boots. Who needs loans when you can move players between “sister clubs”?

And why were they all “sold” in 2022? Since July last year, FIFA has introduced a limit on the number of players that a team can loan to clubs from another country. Initially, the limit was set at eight players, from next month it will be reduced to seven, with the prospect of further reduction to six from 2024.

However, there are no restrictions on… the accumulation of players from larger clubs to smaller clubs under co-ownership, a loophole that has made… the way for City Football Group’s multiple player routes, spreading across clubs it controls and pools that it provides. With transfers that are mostly virtual, with his assets essentially going out of one pocket and into another, he also manages to meet financial fair play criteria and expand an empire where he moves lines in transfers in terms of prices. and preventing the flow of football talent to City’s rival clubs. The aforementioned four players that City have loaded into Troyes are not the exception, but part of the rule. As the British newspaper Mail on Sunday calculated in its related study, 36 players were kept in the same way in affiliated clubs in other countries by the champions of England over the past decade, and in a total of 127 years that they all lived together, these players with City played in the starting lineup only six times, four of which against the Spaniard Angelino. The remaining 33 talented players, that is, did not start a single City match, and the cost of all 36 exceeded 110 million euros for the English team.

All of them, being recognized as not immediately needed by Guardiola’s team, leave the team either as loans, until 2021, or as transfers, mainly from 2022. at City, thus eliminating the possibility of a move to a direct competitor to the Premier League champions while keeping a close eye on their progress.

At the end of the day, there’s a lot of money at City, so buying talented youngsters can be expensive, but it doesn’t bring the club to its knees. Based on data from the CIES Football Observatory of Switzerland, it has been calculated that this year’s Champions League finalist and favorite has a total squad acquisition value of €1.064 billion, with its base eleven for 2022-2023 valued at €605 million. Unlike other clubs, at City they are open to purchases and concessions to friendly clubs, driving up the prices of players to levels that make it difficult for some competitors at home and abroad to chase after them.

When Girona had five players on loan from City in 2017 and Pep’s brother, Pere Guardiola, owned 44% of the club, Spanish league president Javier Tebas accused City of “financial doping” and “accounting tricks” by the Catalan team. who, thanks to the support he receives, managed to rise to the Primera Division.

The issue has now reached European political bodies as Virton, Lommel’s rival in the Belgian second division, has filed a complaint with the European Commission alleging unfair competition. In particular, Virton complained that City Football Group violated new EU rules prohibiting the inflow of foreign capital that distorts the functioning of the domestic market, citing 16 million euros allegedly paid by Abu Dhabi to its budget. group.

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