Ante Palaversa was a highly-rated 18-year-old defensive midfielder from Croatia when Manchester City signed him on the final day of the 2019 January transfer window for a fee reported by the BBC and others of about £7million.
He was captain of the Croatia Under 19s and mentioned as a possible long-term successor to Fernandinho at the Etihad, but was initially allowed to stay on loan at Hajduk Split, where he was an academy product.
Palaversa spent 2019-20 on loan at Oostende in Belgium, the following season on loan at Getafe in Spain and then 2021-22 on loan at Kortrijk in Belgium. Then in the summer of 2022, he joined Troyes in France on a permanent basis, for a fee believed to be nominal or nothing.
He was one of four players who moved from City to Troyes last year. Luka Ilic also moved last summer, while Marlos Moreno and Erik Palmer-Brown went in the 2022 January window. They had collectively spent more than 18 years at City, and none had ever played a single minute for the club.
Their moves to Troyes – a club within the same City Football Group organisation as Manchester City – came as FIFA were preparing to introduce limits on the number of footballers any club can have out on international loan at any one time. These rules were in the pipeline for years and came into force in July last year.
Ante Palaversa was one of four players Manchester City moved to Ligue 1 side Troyes last year
Marlos Moreno (above) was also sent out to the same club but never played a minute for City
Their stated aim is threefold: to prevent the stockpiling of talent, to encourage all clubs to develop players (not just loan them), and to encourage competitive balance.
That Troyes should get four players from City for little or nothing is a piece of good fortune for the French club. No rules have been broken, but FIFA’s new regulations have a loophole the size of a barn door. There is absolutely nothing to prevent ‘multi-club model’ organisations from owning multiple clubs and ‘storing’ players across them, instead of loaning them.
Ultimately if Palaversa, now 23, or any player across City Football Group’s 12 clubs aside from City, had a career that made them attractive to City’s first team, one imagines CFG, as effective controllers of many hundreds of players’ careers, would be in pole position to tempt them back to the club.
City’s stunning domination of English football boils down to hiring one of the all-time great managers and unrivalled depth in a squad that cost a world record €1.064billion (£924m) in transfer fees to assemble.
The respected CIES Football Observatory have calculated the average cost of City’s starting XIs this season at €605m (£525m). In essence, City have two £50m players per position.
City haven’t just spent big, they’ve spent well. Erling Haaland at £51.2m was this season’s major capture and he hasn’t done badly. Jack Grealish (£100m) was the biggest buy the summer before, and in the five seasons before that, the biggest signings were Ruben Dias (£61m), Rodri (£62m), Riyad Mahrez (£60m), Aymeric Laporte (£57m) and John Stones (£47.5m).
At the other end of the recruitment scale, City’s academy is gushing out talent, Phil Foden being the most prominent of three home-growns in the current first-team squad. Romeo Lavia at Southampton is one example from many of an outstanding City product now shining elsewhere.
But City’s grip on talent doesn’t begin and end with star names at big prices and players developed for free.
Daniel Arzani arrived at City after going to the World Cup with Australia as a rising starlet
City haven’t just spent big, they’ve spent well – as shown by their signing of Erling Haaland
Between those two groups is another set of players, which we will call ‘stockpile stars’, signed by City from all over the world as they were first earmarked for glory. They are then typically kept on City’s books for years without playing for them. Mostly they spend their time away from City, often at one or more of the sister clubs within the City Football Group network.
The four City players who all moved to Troyes last year are among these ‘stockpile stars’.
An investigation by The Mail on Sunday has found that City have signed 36 of these players in the past decade alone. You may have heard of some of them: Aaron Mooy of Celtic, perhaps, or Aston Villa’s Douglas Luiz, or Tottenham’s Pedro Porro. They played a grand total of no minutes for City in a combined six years at the club.
You probably haven’t heard of most of the rest, whether Florian Lejeune or Ruben Sobrino, Ilic or Palaversa. They also played a collective zero minutes for City, in a combined 11 years at the club.
In total, the 36 ‘stockpile stars’ bought by City in the past decade have collectively spent 127 years on their books and collectively started six Premier League games. And four of those starts were by one player, Angelino.
The 36 ‘stockpile stars’ cost City a total of £99.67m in fees paid and, so far, have earned £87m in fees recouped.
Yet they have, amid multiple controversies, served City and City Football Group well, firstly by having their careers controlled by CFG and therefore being hoarded where rivals can’t get them. And second they have often performed well for City’s other clubs who, in different circumstances, might not have had access to such talents.
This has caused opprobrium in Spain particularly, where in 2017 Girona had no fewer than five City players on loan: Douglas Luiz, Marlos Moreno, Aleix Garcia, Pablo Maffeo and Olarenwaju Kayode. This led La Liga president Javier Tebas to accuse City of ‘financial doping’ and ‘cooking the books’ to bypass the La Liga spending cap rules which applied to Girona. City said the claims were ‘pure fiction’ and threatened legal action that never materialised.
The five loans happened shortly after CFG bought 44.3 per cent of Girona in August 2017, at the same time that Pep Guardiola’s brother Pere, a football agent, also bought 44.3 per cent of Girona. A spokesman for La Liga told The Mail on Sunday this week: ‘Since 2017 La Liga President Javier Tebas has denounced Manchester City’s practices. These go against financial fair play and can be classified as “financial doping”.’
LaLiga president Javier Tebas has denounced City’s practices, labelling them ‘financial doping’
Full back Angelino spent two separate spells on the books at City but joined RB Leipzig in 2021
The spokesman added that La Liga now make their own assessments of what value can be attributed to on-loan players for spending cap purposes. ‘Also, we discourage that more than one player on loan comes from a linked club,’ the spokesman said, but this cannot be enforced as the new FIFA rules don’t stipulate it.
City had previously done Girona favours two seasons earlier, as they were starting the 2015-16 campaign in Spain’s second division. Girona’s spending cap that season was €3.6m (then worth £2.6m). They could afford to buy just one player that season, Pedro Alcala, for £75,000, and had a tiny wage bill.
They also sold one player, the aforementioned Florian Lejeune, to Manchester City for around £225,000 and City promptly loaned him out for the season… to Girona. At the same time, City bought another player, Ruben Sobrino, for £180,000, rising to £320,000 with add-ons, and immediately loaned him out for the season to Girona.
City Football Group is the biggest and arguably best example of the multi-club organisations that have been springing up and rapidly expanding in recent years. City Football Group now have 13 clubs either owned, co-owned or in formal partnerships, across 13 countries spanning every continent bar Africa, so far.
City have also worked closely with, or done multiple mutually beneficial transactions with, a wider group of clubs where there is no formal partnership, from Sporting Lisbon and Borussia Dortmund, to Southampton, Twente, Vincent Tan’s KV Kortrijk in Belgium, Benfica, Valencia, NAC Breda and Celtic. Many of the ‘stockpile stars’ have been on loan at some of these clubs as well as CFG’s clubs.
When Southampton signed no fewer than four City academy products last summer, including Lavia, two of the moves went through only after Saints had sanctioned the sale of Oriel Romeu to Girona.
Pedro Porro spent almost three years as a City ‘player’ between 2019 and 2022 before being sold at a £4m loss to Sporting Lisbon for £7.2m. Eight months later he was loaned to Spurs, who are obliged to buy him permanently this summer for £40m.
City Football Group have recently caused consternation in Belgium, where their second-tier club, Lommel SK, are the subject of a formal legal complaint to the European Commission by another club in their division, Royal Excelsior Virton. In a recent statement on their website, Virton said CFG are violating new EU regulations to prevent ‘foreign subsidies distorting the internal market’.
Virton are making a legal case that their own annual budget of £4.4m has been dwarfed by almost £15m of foreign ‘state aid’ subsidy to Lommel from City Football Group, which is majority-owned by Abu Dhabi’s Sheik Mansour. Virton argue that without CFG, Lommel have no ‘economic rationality’. The local Belgian regulator has sided with CFG, hence Lommel taking to the matter to European regulators.
La Liga bosses have reached out to Virton to offer assistance. A spokesman said: ‘La Liga understands R E Virton and its position. We have written to the club, explaining in detail the regulations we have in La Liga to prevent market distortions. La Liga would like all leagues to include similar rules regarding this issue.’
City Football Group upset Australian fans and commentators in 2016 when they moved Aaron Mooy from their Melbourne City club to Manchester City, for nothing. The then-Socceroos manager Ange Postecoglu had called Mooy the ‘best and most exciting player in the A-League’. City sent Mooy on loan to Huddersfield for a year then sold him for £8m.
Southampton have signed several City academy products, including midfielder Romeo Lavia
Aaron Mooy also played a grand total of zero minutes for City before moving on to a new club
One leading Australian sportswriter said the episode ‘raises some awkward questions over the ability of an £8m asset to leave the A-League without the competition receiving any direct compensation.’
Eyebrows have also been raised recently in France, over Troyes, and Brazil, where CFG have this month completed a 90 per cent £158m takeover of Bahia.
Just as Virton in Belgium are worried CFG are giving Lommel an unfair advantage, sources at smaller French clubs think Troyes are also getting undue help.
FIFA’s new rules limit any club to a maximum of eight players on international loan (since July 2022), and this will become seven this July and drop to six in July 2024.
The Mail on Sunday pointed out to FIFA that their new rules on stockpiling have an apparently massive loophole. FIFA sources suggested multi-club groups are throwing up issues to which there are no easy answers. A spokesman said: ‘At this stage we are not in a position to discuss potential scenarios.’
Manchester City declined to comment when the MoS sent a list of questions about our investigation.
In Brazil, meanwhile, Bahia, the newly acquired City Football Group club, recently signed a 20-year-old Brazilian midfielder, Diego Rosa, for about £1.8m, from Manchester City, who paid about £5.3m for him in early 2021. The player remains within the CFG orbit and no rules have been broken.
City Football Group clubs appear to be keen on Brazilian talent in recent times. Since the start of 2020 alone, CFG clubs, including City themselves, New York City FC, Yokohama Marinos, Troyes, Lommel and Bahia have signed no fewer than 15 Brazilians combined, directly from Brazilian clubs.
The Brazilian player City directly signed in 2021, striker Kayky, for £8.8m when he was 18, is currently on loan… at Bahia.
City recruited striker Kayky for £8.8m and then sent him out on loan to Bahia in Brazil