City's spending spread far beyond the Premier League

Manchester City's transfer dealings between 2009/10 and 2017/18 went through 46 selling clubs in 19 different national league systems, according to a new BBC Sport analysis. The research puts the club's net spend across those nine seasons at around £900m.

Just over a quarter of that outlay went to other Premier League clubs. Arsenal were the most frequent supplier, selling City four players. The rest was scattered across Europe and beyond — eight separate deals with La Liga clubs, similar sums paid to Benfica and Porto, and around £13m handed to Championship sides for two players.

The figures exclude free transfers, loans and academy graduates, so they cover only senior moves. They also throw up some curious footnotes. Queens Park Rangers pocketed around £9m from a sell-on clause when Raheem Sterling joined from Liverpool in 2015. Barnsley received roughly £7m a year later after John Stones arrived from Everton.

Perhaps the most striking detail concerns Sporting. City made no senior signing from the Lisbon club during the period. Sporting, for their part, did not win the Portuguese title between 2009 and 2018. Whether that says more about City's scouting or Sporting's fortunes is a matter for the reader.

The BBC analysis lands in the middle of a far bigger story. The independent commission that found City guilty of serious breaches of Premier League financial rules concluded that, between 2009/10 and 2017/18, the club used arrangements which artificially inflated revenues and reduced costs by more than £900m. It found that the accounts did not accurately represent City's financial position, and that the club would have substantially breached Premier League and UEFA spending limits had those arrangements been reported accurately.

City have challenged those findings. The Premier League confirmed on 2 October that the club had formally lodged an appeal, which will be heard by an independent Appeal Board.

The transfer trail, meanwhile, tells its own story of what happened to some of the clubs who did business with City. Wolfsburg sold Kevin De Bruyne in 2015. They had finished second in the Bundesliga before his departure, dropped to eighth the following season and then narrowly avoided relegation in successive campaigns. Julian Draxler arrived for roughly half the De Bruyne fee; Dante came in from Bayern Munich. It didn't stop the slide.

Monaco are the other cautionary tale. They had won Ligue 1 and reached the Champions League semi-finals before selling Bernardo Silva and Benjamin Mendy to City in 2017. Within two seasons they were fighting relegation, having recruited the likes of Terence Kongolo and Keita Balde.

City's appeal now sits with the independent Appeal Board. Whatever the outcome, the BBC's numbers offer a reminder of just how far and wide the club's recruitment reached — 46 clubs, 19 leagues, and a net spend of around £900m across nine seasons.