BBC Sport have produced a report on the cost to Premier League clubs of Manchester City’s financial breaches – and Newcastle United are one of the clubs to lose out substantially.

According to the report, Newcastle would have been £60m better off if City had played by the rules.

City were found guilty of 114 breaches of the Premier League’s financial regulations, involving “disguised funding” from its owners, but have appealed the verdict.

Relegation in 2016 Cost Newcastle

The question the report asks is, where would City have finished from 2009 to 2018 – the period covered by the charges – if they hadn’t been able to assemble such a strong squad?

BBC Sport looked at the impact on each Premier League club of league placings, lost European earnings, relegation, and cup final defeats across each of the seasons that Man City broke the rules.

For Newcastle, their relegation to the Championship in the 2015-16 season had the biggest impact.

The report focused on this in particular because City took “at least four points off every 18^th-placed team other than Birmingham City,” and those who finished 18^th could argue that they might have finished higher, were it not for those lost points.

Newcastle finished 18^th in 2015-16, which BBC Sport estimated cost them a “projected” £60.4m, £7.9m of which was “place money” – money they received for their final league position. This is minus the parachute payment they received after relegation.

Man City finished fourth that season with 66 points, and reached the semi-finals of the Champions League.

There is no suggestion that Newcastle are eligible for any compensation, and the club are not pursuing court proceedings against City.

The report calculated that from 2009 to 2018, Premier League clubs lost a combined total of £844m, while City gained £1.17bn.

The club most affected by the scandal is Tottenham Hotspur. The report calculates that they could have lost nearly £120m after missing out on Champions League qualification to City numerous times over that nine-year period.

“Sham Contracts” and a “Disguised Funding Scheme”

City have been found guilty of using “sham contracts” with sponsorship partners to disguise £830m of “secret funding” by its owners, the Abu Dhabi United Group.

These “sham agreements” allowed City’s owners to plough money into the club and avoid “recording what would otherwise have been the largest single-season loss in Premier League history in 2009-10”.

This secret funding went on for nearly a decade and was passed off as revenue generated from sponsorship agreements. City had unprecedented success during that time, winning the Premier League three times – including with a record points total of 100 in 2018. They also won one FA Cup, four League Cups, and two Community Shields.

They were charged with 115 counts of breaching the Premier League’s Financial Fair Play rules in 2023 after hacker Rui Pinto, who runs the Football Leaks website, released confidential documents including emails about the inflated sponsorship deals.

They were found guilty of all but one of the charges last month but appealed. If their appeal fails, they could face sanctions ranging from a fine, to a hefty points deduction, or relegation from the Premier League.