Department of Unnecessarily Complicated Football Arithmetic

Nothing has been decided by anybody. These are constructed scenarios, each scaled against something European football has actually done. There are two different questions here and the page keeps them apart, because they are not the same question and cannot both be answered at once by the same dial.

A points deduction does not unscore a goal. Everything below happened exactly as you remember it; what moves is what it decided. The treatment is the one set on the Honours Board.

Your side, a year at a time, as the market left it. A 4-4-2 picked by value from the squad going into each season; the men in red are the ones the market brought in. Click a name for his story.

The counterfactual as a side rather than a table. The season is replayed one year at a time on whatever you chose at the start, and between seasons the market opens: budgets from what the season paid, the better-placed club choosing first, real players moving at fees derived from their recorded values, and the squad's new worth feeding the next season's strength. Nobody is invented. Every man named was in the record at the club he leaves.

Every other screen here asks what a punishment would have done. This one asks the opposite, which is the question people actually want answered. It is a satire. Nothing in it is a prediction, a plan anybody has, or a claim about any person: it is a long joke about the one thing in football nobody disputes, which is that things which compound, compound. Your club is in every line of it, because a doom your own club is not in is somebody else's problem.

The invoice answers this one club at a time, which is the right way to read it and the wrong way to argue about it. This is the whole division at once, in order, under whatever you turned on at the start. Nobody owes anybody anything — it is arithmetic on published prize money, and no sanction has been decided.

The commission has decided that Manchester City are in breach. It has not yet decided what follows. Neither has the Department, which has no standing to. So this is what everybody reading the page thinks, which is worth exactly as much as that sounds — and not a penny more.

Asking the room…

Show the numbers Charts are drawn from the same sourced figures as the tables. Seasons with no published figure are drawn as gaps, never joined up.

arbitrary The slider is a number you chose. Use the figures derives it instead, from the club's reported turnover and wage bill, the commission's finding, and a wage-to-turnover cap.