The money flowed around football. It made a lot of other clubs richer. It helped teams everywhere and especially in the Premier League.

These have been some of the arguments used by those backing Manchester City in the media and online since the verdicts declaring the club guilty came in and an appeal was announced. The suggestion is that there was a net benefit to the game as a whole, and in particular the clubs to whom Manchester City paid big transfer fees.

The more than £900m by which the independent commission found the club had "inflated" its accounts was not all spent on transfer fees.

Clubs have many bills, including wages for players and other staff, utilities, insurance, infrastructure costs, commercial fees and much more.

But the roughly £1.2bn Man City spent on players between 2009-2018 (about £900m net spend) was more than anybody else in that period.

That outlay was vital in making them England's most successful club, and would surely have been heavily reduced had they not knowingly broken the rules, as the independent commission concluded.

So where did City's money flow to in the transfer market, and what impact did it have?

Football transfers include many costs.