Manchester City have announced the biggest loss in English football history, £197m for the most recent financial year. The loss on that huge scale, bankrolled by the club's oil-rich owner, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan during the third year since he bought City in 2008, eclipses the previous biggest loss ever made, £141m by Chelsea in 2005, the second year of their ownership by the oil oligarch Roman Abramovich.
City's loss was made principally by buying players to make Roberto Mancini's squad strong enough to top the Premier League, and paying wages of £174m, £21m higher than the club's entire turnover. During the 2010-11 financial year City signed Jérôme Boateng for £10.5m, Edin Dzeko for £27m, David Silva for £26m, Yaya Touré for £24m, Aleksandar Kolarov for £19m, Mario Balotelli for £24m and James Milner for £26m, an extraordinary series of player purchases totalling £156.5m.
Mansour made it clear when he took over that he would spend the fortunes necessary to make City successful, and since June 2010 he has personally poured a further £291m into the club. Added to the £500m Mansour invested up to May 31 2010, he has now spent an unprecedented £800m on the football club, to bankroll the expenditure on transfer fees and wages the club would otherwise not have been able to afford. All the money has gone in as equity, in new shares, making it permanent, not as loans. The net loss City made on their operations, £160.5m, was increased by £34.4m writing off the value of several players signed previously, including the Brazilian striker, Jô.
A loss on such record-breaking scale raises immediate concerns about whether City have any chance of complying with Uefa's "financial fair play" rules, which will apply to clubs in European competitions from the 2014-15 season. Uefa will analyse top clubs' accounts for the three years before that, starting with the current 2011-12 financial year, and the rules allow clubs to lose just €45m (£38.5m) in total over those three years. Uefa's rationale is that such subsidised overspending is relentlessly inflating players' wages throughout European football, which has driven clubs insolvent.
City acknowledged the looming enforcement of financial fair play when releasing their figures, restating that despite this record loss close, they will attempt to comply. Graham Wallace, the club's chief operating office, said the 2010-11 financial year, in which those signings of top players added to the mountainous wage bill already accumulated, will be City's worst.
"Our losses, which we predicted as part of our accelerated investment strategy, will not be repeated on this scale in the future," Wallace promised. "These financial results represent the bottoming out of financial losses at Manchester City before the club is able to move towards a more sustainable position in all aspects of its operations in the years ahead.
"As we undertake the club's commercial transformation, we are cognisant of the incoming Uefa financial fair play regulations and consequently we continue to maintain positive and ongoing dialogue with all appropriate football authorities."
The club's chairman, Khaldoon al-Mubarak, a senior adviser to Mansour's al-Nahyan ruling family and the Abu Dhabi government, also implicitly acknowledged City's need not to depend on such huge subsidy from Mansour in coming years:
"Now that we are witnessing progress, both on and off the pitch, it is more important than ever to work towards achieving our ambition to establish Manchester City as a more successful, sustainable and internationally competitive football club, which remains rooted in the heart of the community it serves," al-Mubarak said.
City are confident that with income having risen 22.5% to £153m during 2010-11, the boost of Champions League football, increased TV and commercial earnings from being successful, the £350m 10-year shirt sponsorship and stadium naming rights deal with Etihad airline and the shedding of players no longer part of Mancini's plans, will draw income and spending closer together. They hope to show Uefa a "trend" towards breaking even by 2014-15 even if the losses have not been sufficiently staunched.
While seeing the need to comply with the rules, privately City are bullish too. Their 6-1 derby victory over United last month highlighted a sudden startling contrast between the Manchester club which has been pumped up by £800m owner investment, and United which, as their latest financial figures revealed this week, has now had £578m drained out by the Glazer family's 2005 debt-laden takeover.
While some clubs, most prominently Arsenal, complain that City's owner-spending is hyper-inflating wages and distorting football, City point out that they have broken no rules – so far at least – and in fact should be credited for investing fortunes in England, and in economically blighted east Manchester, at a time of economic meltdown here and in Europe.