Agüero's 2011 Man City move under scrutiny
Man City's guilty verdict over financial rule breaches has revived questions about how Sergio Agüero left Atlético Madrid for the Etihad instead of Real Madrid in 2011.
An independent Commission has found Manchester City guilty of financial rule breaches stretching across nine Premier League seasons, and that ruling has reopened the question of how Sergio Agüero ended up at the Etihad instead of the Bernabéu in 2011.
Between 2009 and 2018, the Commission found, City concealed the true state of their accounts from auditors and regulators, artificially inflating sponsorship income and hiding costs. The club have until Friday to lodge an appeal. Every transfer City made during that nine-year window is now under scrutiny, Agüero's among them.
City signed the Argentine from Atlético Madrid for €36m plus €4m in variables. Real Madrid had been ready to pay his full €45m release clause weeks earlier, and Agüero himself favoured the move to England over the switch to the Bernabéu.
By all accounts, it was Atlético's chief executive, Miguel Ángel Gil Marín, who blocked the Real Madrid deal, wary of the protests that losing their biggest name to the club's fiercest rival could trigger on the terraces. He instead flew to the United States to meet City's president, Khaldoon Al Mubarak, and the club's then sporting director, Brian Marwood, and sold them Agüero.
Years later Atlético and City did business in the other direction, with, moving from the Etihad to the Metropolitano. If City's appeal fails, the scrutiny of that original 2011 deal may widen further, though for now it remains one entry on a much longer list under investigation.
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