Manchester City believe they are becoming the benchmark for Europe’s biggest clubs as they target an era of “unprecedented” success, the club’s chairman has declared.
The Premier League champions announced on Monday that they have posted the second highest turnover in English football history, at £613m, in part thanks to a remarkable rise in commercial revenue.
Recording profits of £41.7m, City said that their commercial takings were worth £309.4m - a 14% year-on-year increase - after announcing more than a dozen new sponsorship deals. Turnover was also boosted by the return of supporters to stadiums following the pandemic.
Khaldoon Al Mubarak, the chairman, welcomed the financial results but warned that the club must not rest on their laurels, calling on the management team to “continuously deliver football success for our fans.”
City have won four of the past five league titles, though the Champions League continues to elude head coach Pep Guardiola.
“If we are to be true to the efforts of all those people that have contributed over the last 14 years to deliver our current successes, we must challenge ourselves to question everything we accept as optimal, and to define new and unprecedented goals and the right strategies to achieve them,” Al Mubarak said.
“This is the task that Sheikh Mansour [the owner], our shareholders and the board have set our management team. In doing so we recognise the fundamental truth that continuously delivering football success for our fans will also continue to create value for our shareholders.”
City’s accounts also showed that their wage budget for the year was £353.9m, which was £30m less than the most recent bill posted by neighbours United. Their wage to turnover ratio for the year was 58%.
Those figures are from before the arrival of Erling Haaland and departures of Gabriel Jesus, Raheem Sterling and Oleksandr Zinchenko.
Al Mubarak added: “In 2008, we gave ourselves the target of exceeding the benchmarks that had been set by others within football, and in doing so, to also exceed the new standards that we believed leading clubs would achieve in the time it would take us to catch up.”
“Our aim was clear – to one day be the club that set the benchmark for others. The statistics and results show that in many ways we are beginning to achieve our long-term ambition.
“But football does not stand still and other leading clubs continue to evolve and develop. We therefore need to constantly challenge ourselves to improve upon what we have achieved. This means innovating further in Manchester and beyond.
“Reimagining ourselves and how we move forward in Manchester and through City Football Group (CFG), the industry leading, multi-club organisation that Manchester City sits at the heart of.”
CFG now comprises 11 clubs, with their teams in New York, Melbourne and Yokohama enjoying recent success.
