Manchester City Financial Cheating Scandal

This week, one of the largest football clubs in the world was found guilty of one of the biggest financial cheating scandals sports has ever seen. And here's how it all went down. In two thousand and eight, Sheikh Mansour used his

private investment company to buy Manchester City. Now the sheikh is one of the most powerful people in the UAE. He's the country's vice president, the brother of its president, and as you can imagine, extremely rich. At the time, football clubs could essentially spend

as much as they wanted to win, and the sheikh did just that. In two thousand and nine, City made about a hundred and twenty-five million pounds from tickets, TV money, and sponsors, shown here with this bar, but spent about two hundred and forty-six million down here with this bar, a loss of around a

hundred and twenty million pounds, shown here with this black dot. The next year, they went even harder, making around a hundred and fifty-three million pounds and spending three hundred and fifty million, with their resulting loss way down here again. A rich owner spending whatever it takes to win didn't

exactly sit well with everyone around the different leagues. So in the following years, first UEFA and then the Premier League brought in rules that capped how much money a club could lose. And the Premier League's version said you couldn't lose more than a hundred and

five million pounds over the course of three years. Manchester City didn't want to stop spending, though, and you could see with these gray bars, those expenses stay really big down here. So the solution was just to make more money.

These bars above show their reported revenue shooting way up, quadrupling in just eight years from where it was in '09. And these dots show their profit, now safely inside the new rules. And a lot of that growth was real, as these blue sections of the bars show revenue

from TV, tickets, and other sponsors. But then there's the shady stuff that happens up here in these gaps. You see, City signed a series of sponsorship deals with companies from Abu Dhabi. According to leaked documents, those included Etihad,

the Abu Dhabi Tourism Authority, Etisalat, and others. What City did was book the full value of those deals as revenue with these dashed boxes here. But the sponsors only paid for these slivers here in

black, and the rest here in red came from the owner, Sheikh Mansour's own company and private wealth. One leaked email even showed Etihad's deal for jersey, stadium, and training facility rights

was worth sixty-seven point five million pounds, shown here with this box. But Etihad paid just eight million of it, with the rest covered by the company of the sheikh. This is the part that's not exactly legal, because the owner's money

can't count as revenue, because that would put us right back where we started. And if you strip all of it out and add the projected losses for their actual revenue with these red dots down here, City would have lost about a hundred

million pounds or more every single year for the last five years of this period, roughly three times what the Premier League allowed. In this entire stretch, Manchester City won three league titles, an FA Cup, and

three League Cups, and you can argue they cheated to win them. Their punishment will be decided separately, and the possibilities range from huge fines to point deductions to strip titles or even relegations.

So this isn't quite over yet, but that is where things stand as we speak. Follow for more sports data visualizations.