After the 2013-14 season, the team that finished fifth in the Premier League received a "merit payment" of £19.8 million.
A 12-year-old boy has been awarded £120,000 by a court that agreed he had been left severely disabled by narcolepsy triggered by the swine flu vaccine, following a three-year battle in which the government had claimed that his illness was not serious enough to merit payment.
According to this model, 50%% of the revenue is distributed equally, 25%% consists in merit payment (which depends upon where a club finishes in the league table) and 25%% in facility fees (paid according to how many times a club's matches are shown on UK television).
Once a person had been selected to acquire news and their news had been deemed so important that it merited payment, then this informer's reports were more likely to be to trusted, even in the face of contradictory information.
But additional merit payments may be added on at the discretion of management as rewards for good performance.
So the five-hundred-thousand-pound loss from merit payments might turn into eight hundred and fifty thousand pounds or more.
Dierdre English: As Megyn Kelly said, what kind of a horror could possibly merit payments of that size.
Given the changes in odds above, losing Sterling would lead to an expected drop of about five hundred thousand pounds in merit payments — a paltry sum relative to his salary.
That might be too much, even for a club trying to take home the Premier League trophy, with its £24.7 million in merit payments and guaranteed entry to the group stage of the Champions League.
The club's income went up from £162m the previous year to £185m and it said "a large part of this increase" was due to Premier League TV and merit payments for finishing second.
But some union officials said that because the contract was more generous than city officials had originally planned, the city would probably not be able to find much more money in its budget to make large merit payments on top of the across-the-board raises.
