Which teams have benefited most from City’s criteria-free spending!

Manchester City’s money circulated through most of the football world. Between the summer of 2009 and the winter transfer window of 2018, 46 clubs from 19 different leagues finalised deals with the English club.

A BBC analysis, based on data from Transfermarkt, reconstructs a figure approximating what City spent to bring global stars to the “Etihad Stadium”.

No club received as much as Wolfsburg, which collected around 113.5 million euros for Edin Dzeko and Kevin De Bruyne. Monaco holds second place with 107.6 million euros collected for Benjamin Mendy and Bernardo Silva.

Arsenal completes the podium with 83.5 million euros and a noticeable distinction: they were the team that transferred the most players to City, four in total: Emmanuel Adebayor, Kolo Touré, Samir Nasri and Gaël Clichy.

The ranking offers a picture of the scale of the investment, although it does not include all the costs of a transaction. Transfer fees may include agents’ commissions, signing bonuses and legal or administrative expenses. The analysis also excludes loans, free transfers and promotions from the youth academy.

Spanish clubs appear on this map headed by Barcelona, which benefited by 48.2 million euros from the sales of Yaya Touré and Claudio Bravo. The Catalan club comes after Valencia and Athletic Club among the Spanish clubs that earned the most from transfers to English clubs during the period analysed.

Valencia received 73.5 million euros for David Silva and Nicolás Otamendi, while Athletic earned 65.3 million euros for Aymeric Laporte.

Sevilla also, with 45.3 million euros for Álvaro Negredo and Jesús Navas; Atlético Madrid, with 44.7 million euros for Sergio Agüero and Martín Demichelis; and Real Madrid, with 30 million euros for Danilo. A.V.