Manchester City chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak has defended the club’s spending and accused La Liga president Javier Tebas of hypocrisy over allegations that they are distorting the transfer market.
The Premier League champions, who are under investigation from Uefa over a potential breach of Financial Fair Play rules, have spent more than £1 billion on players since they were bought by Sheikh Mansour in 2008.
Speaking at the Financial Times’ Business of Football summit on Tuesday, Tebas criticised the ownership models of City and French champions Paris Saint-Germain saying they caused an imbalance that is stretching football to its economic limits.
“He talks about how we distorted the market? There is a hypocrisy in this statement that is ironic,” Al Mubarak said. “Number one, let’s look at the Spanish league, the time of breaking records on player acquisitions, I mean, who started that?
“Let’s go back to the world records, Figo, Zidane. These huge jumps in these transfers, where did they happen? You know, the history, you have to look back at the history of La Liga, a league dominated by two clubs and Mr. Tebas should look back at the history of that league and how distortion that has happened throughout the ages.
“And then you look back at transfers. In the top ten transfers of all time, Manchester City has not a single player in that, not a single one.”
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Tebas, who has run Spain’s top league for the past six years, singled out Qatari-owned PSG and Abu Dhabi-owned City claiming the sport is like a “plaything of a state”.