One argument has done a lot of work for Manchester City this week. The money went round, the thinking goes, so everybody did well out of it. Selling clubs got paid, agents got paid, the game got richer. If a net benefit was spread across football, where exactly is the harm?
It is worth following the money and seeing what it actually did when it arrived.
£1.2bn, 46 clubs, 19 countries
The independent commission found City had inflated their accounts by more than £900m. Not all of that went on transfer fees, obviously, because clubs also pay wages, utilities, insurance, infrastructure and commercial costs. But the roughly £1.2bn City spent on players between 2009 and 2018, about £900m of it net, was more than anybody else managed in that window, and that outlay is what turned them into the most successful club in England.
Fees went to 46 different clubs across 19 national league systems. Just over a quarter of the total landed with Premier League sides; City signed from eight English top-flight clubs and from the same number in La Liga, and spent a combined £13m on two Championship players. For several of the selling clubs, the cheque from Manchester was the largest they had ever received.
Getting paid is not the same as getting better
Here is the part the "it helped everyone" line skates past. Wolfsburg took a large fee for Kevin de Bruyne, spent about half of it on Julian Draxler in 2016 and brought in others including the veteran defender Dante, then fell from second to eighth in the Bundesliga and spent the following two seasons narrowly avoiding relegation. Monaco sold Benjamin Mendy and Bernardo Silva in the same summer, replaced them with Terence Kongolo and Keita Balde, and went from winning Ligue 1 and reaching a Champions League semi-final to nearly going down within two years.
Arsenal, the club City bought the most players from in that period with four, mounted no serious title challenge across those years. Of the twelve clubs who received the most money from City, only the two Portuguese ones won a major trophy within four years of the sale.
And the clubs who got nothing have a complaint of their own. City paid very similar totals to Benfica and Porto and not a penny to Sporting, who won no title between 2009 and 2018. There are plenty of reasons for that. Whether one of them is that their two domestic rivals were being funded by money that should never have been in the system is a question nobody at Sporting is in a position to answer.
The sell-on clauses nobody talks about
Some of the money reached clubs that never dealt with City at all. Queens Park Rangers earned roughly £9m from Raheem Sterling's 2015 move to City from Liverpool. Barnsley took about £7m of the fee City paid Everton for John Stones in 2016, and Everton passed about £2.5m on to Wolves when Joleon Lescott moved to Manchester in 2009.
Those were enormous sums for clubs at that level. Barnsley have still not sold a player for more than they received for Stones. They dropped from the Championship to League One two seasons later. QPR have not been back in the Premier League since.
Money changes a club's balance sheet. It does not necessarily change its trajectory, and in several of these cases the windfall arrived and the decline happened anyway. Untangling what football would look like had the rules been followed is beyond anyone at this distance. Too much has happened since. But "the money helped everybody" is a claim that gets weaker the closer you look at where it went.
Context: An independent commission found Manchester City inflated their accounts by more than £900m. The club spent roughly £1.2bn on players between summer 2009 and winter 2018, around £900m net, paying fees to 46 clubs in 19 national league systems. City have confirmed an appeal against the guilty verdict.
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