Man City transfer advantage over rivals that shows no sign of slowing down

Manchester City sold several first-team players last summer, marking the first major squad shake-up in five years.

The club had sold high-profile individuals before, such as Leroy Sane to Bayern Munich in 2020 or Ferran Torres to Barcelona in January 2022, but the departures of Raheem Sterling, Oleksandr Zinchenko, and Gabriel Jesus before this season marked a significant change for the Blues. It also allowed them to post profits for the year, given the £120m they got from these three transfers.

City also conducted important business at academy level, with Southampton alone spending almost £45m on four promising prospects. While the buying club gets more control than they would with a loan deal, City's recruitment team stuck a number of clauses into the deals that gives them the potential to make or save money in the future if, as Pep Guardiola put it, the players 'explode' with regular first-team football.

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The fruits of those transfers were almost ripe in the very same transfer window; Chelsea came in with a bid for Romeo Lavia months after his move from City, and the club had the option to match but ultimately were told Southampton would be rejecting it anyway. Still, City have clauses for a number of young players they have sold that allow them either to buy them back at a set price or to get a percentage of the fee that somebody else pays.

This almost came into play with Lavia and certainly did in 2021 with Jadon Sancho when the former Blues youngster signed for neighbours United. Having negotiated 15 per cent of any profit that Dortmund made on him back in 2017, they received almost £10m from the fee that United paid.

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