Manchester City FC reports £20.5m profit

Manchester City chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak commends the performance of the men's and women's first teams.

Manchester City Football Club has recorded £20.5million profit, marking the second consecutive year of profitability for Manchester City and an eighth successive year of improved financial performance, with a record total of £391.8million in revenues being reported on Tuesday.
The annual report for 2015-16, describes the highlights of the season for Manchester City's men's, women's and youth teams, its fans and partners, business operations and financial performance. Significant activities in this reporting period include the opening of the newly expanded Etihad Stadium, in which attendance records were repeatedly broken, the investment in City's parent company City Football Group by China Media Capital Holdings (CMC), which valued the Group at $3billion, and the change of the Manchester City badge, driven and influenced by fans.
In the report, chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak, commends the performance of the men's and women's first teams and highlights in particular, the record number of trophies won by the youth teams as the Club celebrated its first year of being based at the City Football Academy.
More widely, he speaks of the continued on and off -field evolution of Manchester City, noting that, "the transformation of Manchester City under the ownership of Shaikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan has never been anything other than a long-term project" and that "we have set ambitious goals and achieved many of them faster than expected in the last eight years, but we have never underestimated the scale of the undertaking." Perhaps most significantly, the chairman references the 2015-16 season as a turning point in the Club's evolution, commenting,
"Manchester City has now reached a level of sporting and commercial maturity that allows one to feed the other", calling this "the vision for success and sustainability that we have been working towards since 2008."
Chief executive Ferran Soriano notes that "long-term financial sustainability [.] is another well-documented key objective for us and we are seeing consistent and continued evidence of this in our financial performance."
He looks to the future, encouraged by the club's "solid base" and its "committed owners and partners, world-class coaches and players, superb facilities, highly talented employees, and the most passionate and enduring supporters."
"I believe the 2016-17 season represents the beginning of a critical new phase in the evolution of Manchester City. We know that we have the playing, coaching and off-field capabilities at our disposal to achieve great things in English and European football in the years ahead," concluded Al Mubarak.
- business@khaleejtimes.com