Despite the price of oil falling by more than half in the last six months, Abu Dhabi-owned Manchester City have confirmed the signing of Ivory Coast striker Wilfried Bony for a fee of $38m, potentially rising to $43m if certain conditions are met. City now possess the top three Premier League goal scorers of 2014: Bony (20 goals), Sergio Aguero (18) and Yaya Toure (17). It also makes Bony – currently at the Africa Cup of Nations in Equatorial Guinea –the most expensive African footballer in history, and brings Man City’s gross transfer spending for 2014-15 to over $125m.
In wholly unrelated news, it has emerged that UEFA are investigating Manchester City for some less than transparent accounting practices. In their last set of report and accounts, City spread their financial losses across two subsidiary companies: City Football Services Ltd and City Football Marketing Ltd. While you’d be forgiven for forgetting, City were found guilty of breaching UEFA’s Financial Fair Play (FFP) rules back in April 2014 for making losses in excess of FFP limits. In addition to a fine, City were told to cap their wage bill at current levels for the next two seasons, “significantly limit” spending on transfers (a ha ha ha ha ha) during the same period and – crucially – not make losses greater than $23.6m in 2014 and $11.8m in 2015.
The two subsidiaries – which have taken on 130 members of staff previously employed directly by Man City – posted combined losses of $39.3m, limiting City Football Group’s losses (the company that owns Man City) to $34.9m: approximately half their losses from last year.
City argue that the sharing of costs reflects their global business, which includes both New York City FC (the team from whom they've indefinitely loaned Frank Lampard) and Melbourne City FC. It will be up to UEFA to decide how much of the two subsidiaries’ $39.3m losses should actually be on Man City’s books.
All of which sounds incredibly like Michel Platini’s “historic” Financial Fair Play ruling isn’t doing quite as well as he’d like. Not that Swansea City will be grumbling: they’ve just made a $20m profit on a player they signed just 18 months ago.
Everyone’s winning.
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