Manchester City and the Abu Dhabi takeover

Background

Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan's Abu Dhabi United Group agreed to buy Manchester City on 1 September 2008. That was transfer deadline day, and the 2008-09 season had already started on 16 August. The deal completed on 23 September, but 1 September is the date the club and its fans mark as the takeover, so 2008-09 is treated here as the first post-takeover season.

The analysis uses every Premier League result from 1992-93 to the end of 2025-26, merged from four public sources into a single cleaned match table. Every league table on this page is rebuilt from individual match results rather than taken from published standings, so the same code can recompute any season with a team removed.

From mid-table to a fixture in the top four

Before the takeover, City were a mid-table club that was relegated twice, in 1996 and 2001, and spent five seasons outside the Premier League. Across their 11 top-flight seasons before 2008-09 they averaged 13.5th and never finished higher than 8th.

In the first season after the takeover they finished 10th. From 2010-11 onwards they have finished in the top four every season, and won the league 8 times. Their average finish over the 18 post-takeover seasons, 2008-09 to 2025-26, is 2.4.

The league table without Manchester City

To ask "who would have won without City?", each season's table is rebuilt as if City had never played. The method drops every match City took part in, home and away, so each remaining club keeps only its results against the other clubs. In a 20-team season that gives a 19-team table in which everyone has played 36 games instead of 38.

This is a small function that wraps the existing table builder. The only new step is filtering out both sides of every fixture involving the excluded team.

def league_table_excluding_team(team_matches, season, excluded_team):
    """A season's table as if `excluded_team` had never played -- every other
    team keeps only its matches against the remaining clubs."""
    without = team_matches[
        (team_matches["team"] != excluded_team)
        & (team_matches["opponent"] != excluded_team)
    ]
    return league_table(without, season)

Would anyone else have won the title?

Yes, and in every case it's the club that actually finished second. City won 8 Premier League titles after the takeover. With their results removed, Manchester United and Liverpool would each have won three of those, and Arsenal two.

The margins vary a lot. In 2011-12 City won the league on goal difference, and United had lost both derbies, so taking City out leaves United's 89 points unchanged. In 2017-18 City's 100 points were 22 clear of what the runner-up would have finished on.

The would-be champion played 2 fewer games once its matches against City are removed, so its total isn't directly comparable with a 38-game season. The margin shows how far ahead City finished.

Who inherits City's European place?

A top finish doesn't only decide the title. It also takes up a Champions League or Europa League place that would otherwise go to someone else. Running the same without-City table for all 18 post-takeover seasons shows who would have picked up that place.

City finished in the top five in 17 of those 18 seasons. The only exception was 2008-09, the takeover season itself, when they finished 10th. In each of those 17 seasons, removing City frees exactly one place, so exactly one extra club gets into Europe.

Usually the club directly below the European places is the one that moves up. The one exception is 2020-21.

Tottenham and Arsenal gain the most, with five extra European seasons each. Four of Tottenham's are in the Champions League.

Takeaways

• The takeover marks a clear break. City went from averaging 13.5th with no titles to averaging 2.4 with 8 titles, including 16 straight top-four finishes.
• City's titles came at the expense of the traditional contenders. Without City, Manchester United and Liverpool would each have three more league titles, and Arsenal two.
• Further down the table, City's presence cost Tottenham and Arsenal the most European football: five seasons each. Removing City doesn't always promote the next club, as the 2020-21 case shows.

Limitations and next steps

• "Without City" is a counterfactual. It assumes every other result stays the same, and ignores things like squad rotation around big games or fixture congestion from the European places City took.
• Modelling European places properly would need cup results (FA Cup and League Cup winners), which the current datasets don't include.
• league_table_excluding_team() works for any club, so the same question can be asked about other dominant periods, such as Manchester United in the 1990s and 2000s, or Chelsea after 2003.

Data and methods

• Data: public Premier League results datasets (1992-93 to 2022-23, 2000-01 to 2024-25, and an early-season 2025-26 snapshot) plus football-data.co.uk files for the full 2024-25 and 2025-26 seasons, merged into one match table containing only the fields every season has: teams, date and full-time score. The sources agree on the score of every match they share.
• Tables: rebuilt from match results with 3 points for a win and 1 for a draw, ranked by points, then goal difference, then goals scored.
• Checks: the notebook tests its results against known facts (for example, City's 89-point title in 2011-12 won on goal difference) and checks that every without-City table has one fewer team, with each remaining team on two fewer games.
• Takeover sources: 2008-09 Manchester City F.C. season (Wikipedia), mancity.com: 12 years since the takeover, Premier League Archive: the Abu Dhabi Group takeover.

View the full notebook with code