Well publicly City have:
Etihad Airways at £70 M ish
https://www.statista.com/statistics/254569/manchester-city-revenue-from-kit-sponsorship/
Puma at £65 M
Asahi beer at £20M a year
https://cityxtra.co.uk/4987/manches...r-kit-sponsor-in-expanded-record-partnership/
EA Sports extended deal (can't find a number but bet it isn't small)
OKX at £20 M
Nexen Tyres at £12.5 M
Nissan at something like £5 M
These are hardly small names.
So publicly reported deals are at around
£192 M, then you have to add in the EA deal whatever that is and then all the other 20 or so smaller sponsors, and then on top of that all the merchandise sales they make and events etc. Do you really not think it's feasible that their reported £373 M commercial revenue is legit? It's not wild numbers. The rest of their revenue comes from prize money and broadcasting.
The only sponsor giving decent amounts that are slightly suspect might be OKX as crypto can be suspect and Etisalat the communications company from Abu Dhabi, but I don't think they are in material amounts.
There are still issues with all of this though. For the Puma deal, it is a £650 M, 10-year deal, but it is a deal with City Football Group, not just Manchester City.
Per Forbes, in a previous deal 92% of such revenue was credited to City, so you can dock some from the amount you reported as attributable to City there. Etihad is a state-backed and founded company sponsorship, which is presumptively suspect. Yes, you can talk all day about third-party "fair value" assessments, but when such a loss-making business founded in 2003 decides to shell out multi-millions in sponsorship and eventually stadium naming rights about 5 years into its existence, it is going to raise eyebrows even though CAS deemed this not to be a related-party transaction, despite many suspicious governance and relationship overlaps. It's not unheard of, as a lot of Silicon Valley startups engage in dumb, expensive marketing shenanigans during their early, loss-making years in order to gain market share, but not too many of those companies are conceived of, financed and backed by a state. Notably, City engaged CAA to assist in the search for a new shirt sponsor in 2018, but after a presumed renewal after the initial deal expired Etihad still remains the sponsor in a deal for which the total value and duration are unknown or undisclosed (see Athletic below). Did the market not bear a more lucrative sponsorship deal than the one with Etihad?
If you net out the prorated portion of the CFG sponsorship attributable to other CFG clubs and add, say, £20M for EA Sports (just a generous guess), it takes you to just over £200M of commercial revenue accounted for in these deals you've listed.
This site, citing R&D sports analytics and data company Sponsorlytix, places City's Retail, Merchandise, Apparel and Product Licensing revenue at ~£37M, significantly behind Arsenal, Liverpool, United and Chelsea. As noted in that article, there are many devils and details missing, but I'm just using some this to approximate some kind of picture of City's commercial revenue, given that a lot of this is not reported in a public and transparent way. That gap between ~£250M and £373M is not immaterial in the aggregate, even if individual deals might be.
The Athletic lays out the complicated interweb of overlapping business and family connections at the heart of these other sponsorships. Mubadala is a shareholder in Masdar and Aldar Properties, for example. These types of connections go on and on. Another such example of a commercial sponsor is Noon, described as an e-commerce platform with operations in the Middle East, but with ambitions of being the Amazon of the region. It is
founded by a guy who literally developed the Burj Khalifa after having started his career in the UAE Central Bank. City could legally maneuver their way out of all of these coincidences and apparent conflicts, but when you are running a business or have operations in a particular regions and have the specter of state control and retribution, it paints a cloud over the whole enterprise. In this case, you have a bunch of carrots and sticks to sort through. Piss off the state or people involved therewith and get the stick, play nice and get a carrot, whether a board seat, backing from a SWF or a myriad of other ways to get things done. Has anyone heard from Jack Ma lately?
Other
snafus, suggest that City have, at times, been a bit haphazard and less than diligent in trying to drive up commercial revenue through these smaller, underreported sponsorship deals. It is true that a lot of clubs have been caught in questionable betting sponsor or crypto deals, but in City's case such deals seem to represent a comparatively larger portion their commercial revenue. I would probably grant you that City would likely not be undergoing as much scrutiny if they were not as successful and other clubs finances and sponsorships are not scrutinized to the extent that City's are.
There is a whole different debate to be had about whether City has breached the letter of these regulations versus the spirit of them and whether the initial impetus and intent of these regulations were really about financial sustainability, anti-competitively entrenching accumulated financial advantage and status, sporting equity or some combination thereof. But, even with the rationale of sporting success in the most financially prosperous league driving commercial growth, surely you can at least see why people might raise a few eyebrows at the numbers being reported?
