Not Sheiking It Off

And so to The New York Times, where Adam Crafton writes:

In those early, mysterious days of Sheikh Mansour’s ownership of Manchester City, chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak offered a window into how he hoped the club would be seen following their 2008 takeover. “There is almost a personification of the club with the values we hold as Abu Dhabi, as Sheikh Mansour,” Al Mubarak told British newspaper The Guardian. “These are loyalty, commitment, discipline, long-term thinking, respect, appreciation of history… We are acknowledging that how we are handling this project is telling a lot to the world about how we are.” He continued: “This is showing the world the true essence of who Abu Dhabi is and what Abu Dhabi is about.”

Last week, a judgment came down on City, declaring the club to have cheated financial rules across almost a decade. If we take Al Mubarak at his word, the Premier League verdict becomes a judgement, by extension, on Abu Dhabi. For a very long time, City have sought to impress upon journalists that they are not state-owned by the United Arab Emirates. In legal terms, they are correct. Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan may well be a member of the royal family, deputy prime minister and vice president of the UAE, as well as the half-brother of the state’s ruler Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (also known as MBZ). But, on paper, Mansour is the majority shareholder in City via Newton Investment and Development, a company which may be registered in Abu Dhabi, but that he wholly owns privately.

Yet, in spirit and to the layperson’s eyes, City are inseparable from Abu Dhabi. The club’s shirt, stadium and academy campus are all sponsored by the UAE airline Etihad, whose chairman is appointed directly by MBZ. City’s chairman Al Mubarak has a portfolio of responsibilities which includes being chief executive of Mubadala, a sovereign investment firm which has $385billion (£291bn) worth of assets under management. He also chairs the board of Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank and serves on the board of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, as well as chairing the UAE’s Executive Affairs Authority, which provides policy advice to the country’s president. Other City sponsors include Abu Dhabi telecommunications firm Etisalat and tourism brand Experience Abu Dhabi, as well as Aldar Properties, whose board is chaired by Al Mubarak’s brother, Mohamed Khalifa.

In the good times, Abu Dhabi has been able to bask in the reflective glow of City’s successes on the pitch. Now, in the worst of times, City’s conduct casts a long shadow on the Gulf state. All of which placed the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Andy Burnham in a pickle. As he sought to balance a multitude of interests, Burnham ended up in a bind when asked for his view on the possibility of City’s owners being forced out of English football. “I would be really concerned to lose them,” Burnham told the BBC. “They’ve been such a huge partner in the building of modern Manchester and obviously the building of Manchester City into the global force that it is. “I do actually thank the City Football Group and the wider ownership for the money that they didn’t just put into the Etihad (City’s home stadium) and the campus around it but also into the city.” 

The BBC reported that Burnham said “it would be wrong for him to intervene”, yet by giving a view at all, had he already made life more difficult for those adjudicating on City’s sanctions? On Thursday, the government found itself in retreat, twice seeking to clarify Burnham’s statement. A spokesperson said: “As the Prime Minister made clear, the initial judgement is serious and there can’t be any suggestion that anyone is above the rules… If wrongdoing is established, those responsible should face the appropriate consequences.” After social-media users rapidly pointed out that wrongdoing had been established by the Premier League, Burnham’s spokesperson issued an amended statement, saying: “Wherever wrongdoing is established, those responsible should face the appropriate consequences.” City, it should be said, continue to deny wrongdoing, and have appealed. 

For Burnham, it was a clumsy episode which underlined the quandary facing him and his government. But it felt revealing that his first instinct was to empathise with an ownership group that has poured resources into the UK, rather than join the masses horrified by what Richard Masters, the Premier League’s chief executive, described as the “systematic” breaking of rules across nearly a decade. The challenge for Burnham is both regional and global. To the United Kingdom, the UAE is not a pariah state. As a source close to several politicians of the ruling Labour Party, speaking anonymously to protect relationships, explained to The Athletic, UK lawmakers may not always be comfortable with how the UAE operates regarding Russia’s ongoing war with Ukraine, and plenty have concerns about its conduct in Sudan, but taken as a whole, the UK-UAE relationship is considered crucial across security, investment and trade. 

It does not make matters any easier that City’s chairman Al Mubarak is, to all intents and purposes, an official representative of Abu Dhabi. When the previous UK Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, landed in Abu Dhabi for talks about the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz in April, amid the ongoing conflict involving the United States, Israel and Iran, the man to greet him on the runway was Al Mubarak, seemingly on official government business. He is also the UAE’s Presidential Special Envoy to China, and according to Mubadala’s website, “leads several significant country files on behalf of the UAE.” In the same biography, which stretches to 723 words, it says Al Mubarak was previously made Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2013, and, in 2021, received the Freedom of the City of London.

On Friday, a City of London Corporation spokesperson told The Athletic the latter honour was bestowed “in recognition of the close trading relationship between the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates” and his “leadership role” at Mubadala. The same honour was recently given to Sir Geoff Hurst, the England striker who scored a hat-trick as they won the World Cup final in 1966. It is an ancient tradition, first awarded in the 13th century, which has evolved from granting a person the right to trade in London (and the right to take your sheep over London Bridge) into a more symbolic recognition.

On Thursday, it emerged Al Mubarak was also granted UK diplomatic immunity six years ago, according to the publicly available list on the UK government website, which may complicate any potential civil or criminal legal action involving City. “He has been the effective prime minister of Abu Dhabi for many years,” explains Christopher M Davidson, author of Abu Dhabi: Oil & Beyond. “He has a strong and commanding position of big chunks of Abu Dhabi’s state-backed economy. He is the economics guru, or right-hand man of MBZ, the ruler, with a relationship with him that goes back many decades. It is hard to identify a more trusted and closer lieutenant not just to Sheikh Mansour, but to the ruler himself.” 

The sensitivity of the UK position is obvious in the topline numbers. According to the UAE’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, bilateral trade between the two countries exceeds £25billion per year and the UAE-UK Sovereign Investment Partnership, which launched in 2021 with a £10bn five-year target, has already committed nearly £30bn across more than 50 direct investments. It claims this has supported 48,000 UK jobs, “with a further 280,000 expected by 2030”. Earlier this year, the UK secured a free trade agreement with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), of which the UAE is one of six states across the Arabian Peninsula. Around 250,000 British nationals are estimated to live in the UAE, many in Dubai. The UK has also been providing air defence support for its Gulf partners amid the ongoing conflict centered on Iran.

It is this interdependence, combined with Burnham’s comments, which has stoked fears among football fans that politics may yet infringe upon the Premier League’s appetite for sanctions. After all, this is not a case that falls behind a layer of unnamed UAE bureaucrats. For Burnham, the proximity to Abu Dhabi has fallen closer to home. Between 2017 and 2026, Burnham was the mayor of Greater Manchester. The current ownership of City had been in place for more than a decade before he entered office, during which time Manchester City Council sold off vast swathes of land to Sheikh Mansour’s private equity fund.

Last year, the Manchester Mill website revealed a ten-year “Collaboration Agreement” had been signed by the Manchester City Council and Sheikh Mansour’s Abu Dhabi United Group in December 2015. The contract, obtained by freedom of information requests, revealed that the council had offered “right of first refusal” to the company over council-owned land in the area. The local council has also previously been accused by academics at the University of Sheffield of providing Abu Dhabi with a “sweetheart” deal, which they argued allowed the investors to benefit disproportionately. A Manchester City Council spokesman previously disputed the report, saying the land was valued by independent experts and the agreement was the best available “at a time when there was very little market interest in the area”. 

The council’s argument would be that the City ownership assisted a radical transformation of previously neglected areas of east Manchester and the trade-off was necessary during a period in which the UK’s then Conservative government had pulled back on public investment. Jonathan Reynolds, the UK’s secretary of state for business, innovation, science and trade, recently told The Athletic: “If you look at New Islington (in Manchester), there was a social-housing estate that people abandoned properties on; they did not want to live there. Now it’s one of the most sought-after places, with loads of families and young professionals and all the benefits for an economy that come from people living in the city. It’s that investment that’s turned (those places) desirable. They weren’t desirable before then.” 

The story of gentrification is well told and not unique to Manchester, often accompanied by broader economic growth but rising rents and not always sufficient opportunities or affordable housing for those who had been in place prior to the luxury towers moving in. The UK’s Sunday Times newspaper has previously described Manchester as the city that “sold out” to Abu Dhabi. The Guardian said it had sold itself to the Abu Dhabi elite — and not even for a good price. Reynolds, who has lived in the city for more than 20 years, told The Athletic he reads those conclusions with an element of “disbelief”.

Davidson, an author and academic who worked in Abu Dhabi when the club was acquired in 2008, says the state’s political instincts were sharp, recognising that investment in the north of England was a cross-party priority for the UK. Previous Conservative governments had talked up the idea of a Northern Powerhouse, an attempt to rebalance the economic gap between the north and south of the country. “Abu Dhabi was there to help that,” he tells The Athletic. “There was a soft-power element to demonstrate to the UK more broadly that the UAE’s investments are necessary and positive. The Gulf states had a finger on the pulse of domestic UK politics. They saw a way of going further than the soccer club itself and actually becoming an integral part of the UK’s northern economics.” 

Most people agree investment by the City owners has supported economic growth in Manchester. Burnham has since pitched his platform onto that story, which tracked at 3.1 per cent annually across a decade, far outpacing the UK nationally and producing so many tall buildings that the city earned the nickname ‘Manc-hattan’. In recent years, it has hosted the Chanel catwalk and taken pop music’s Brit Awards ceremony from London, while basketball’s NBA is bringing games to the new indoor, 23,500-capacity Co-Op Live arena, located next to the Etihad Stadium, this winter. That arena is co-owned by City Football Group (CFG). Burnham’s political project is often described as ‘Manchesterism.’ On Tuesday, he said in his Labour Party conference speech: “I intend to take what I did in Manchester, our plan for good growth, and drive it from the very centre of government into every postcode in Britain.”

Yet that Manchester association, previously deemed a virtue, is now thorny ground. Because what if that growth story was turbo-charged by a football club ownership now judged to be serial financial cheats? What if Burnham’s magic potion for revitalizing Manchester was not, in fact, the region’s get-up-and-go attitude and the policy-making latitude provided by devolution, but an excessive dependence on foreign money from people now embroiled in one of the world’s greatest sporting scandals?

There is more to Manchester’s story of improvement than Abu Dhabi’s riches, but any perceived loyalty to the City owners threatens to raise questions about Burnham’s consistency and integrity. In that same conference speech, Burnham said he was tiring of a world where “shareholders never lose” and “the public never win”. He asked his audience to “imagine living in a Britain where people feel the country has got their back again”. Yet, by appearing sympathetic to City’s plight, did he accidentally find himself on the side of billionaire owners who are also now facing questions about tax evasion?

On Thursday, leading UK tax consultancy Tax Policy Associates released a report in which it scrutinized some of what is known about City’s case and concluded that offshore payments made to the club’s then manager Roberto Mancini alone may have led to £12 million in unpaid UK tax. “The consequences could include a much larger tax bill and a criminal investigation… The commission’s finding that Manchester City knowingly filed false accounts suggests that Companies Act offences may have been committed,” the Tax Policy Associates report said.

Little wonder, then, that Burnham, who is seeking to position his platform against the establishment and on the side of the British public, quickly found himself rewriting statements. This did not satisfy the rival Liberal Democrats, who called for Burnham to publish details of any meetings with City’s owners and declare any hospitality he has previously accepted at the Etihad. This episode served to underline the uneasy realities of governing the UK in 2026, a country that has left the European Union and finds itself working overtime to entice investments from Gulf nations. Reynolds, speaking to The Athletic before the news on City’s charges broke, said it was not his place to be a salesperson for the UAE, but credited the country as an “incredibly stable, prosperous place, with quite a lot of legitimacy for the people who run it”. He said the Manchester investment story has “been really good”, a view that would almost certainly be echoed by politicians of most stripes when embedded into government. That was all before the publication of the Premier League’s verdict. But within the past month, Reynolds has met in person with Al Mubarak. A government source denied the City verdict was discussed in the meeting.

Some football fans are anxious about political involvement as precedents exist for government manoeuvring over sensitive Premier League matters. Previously, The Athletic obtained 59 pages of emails from the UK Foreign Office revealing extensive exchanges between government departments and the Premier League at a time when the PIF Saudi sovereign fund was attempting to conclude a takeover of Newcastle United in 2021. This included papers which detailed how the UK government considered the possible failure of the Saudi takeover of Newcastle to be an “immediate risk” to the relationship with the Gulf nation, as well as a chief advisor to then Prime Minister Boris Johnson seeking to find a “senior interlocutor to impress the interests” of the government on the Premier League. The papers even included details such as the UK Department of International Trade (DIT) intending to distribute a public relations offer to those involved in the takeover, with the Saudis long accused of egregious human-rights abuses. Masters had previously claimed there was “no pressure applied” by the government during that takeover process and the Premier League denied the eventual acceptance of the Saudi-led bid was related to government interference.

Multiple sources familiar with the workings of the UK government acknowledged this week that there will be plenty of parts of the state machinery anxious about next steps, but the same sources insisted there should be enough people around the prime minister who make the argument that big cheques cannot legitimise the undermining of the Premier League, itself one of the UK’s great soft-power exports. The UK government has previously admitted in 2023 that its embassy in Abu Dhabi and the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office in London have discussed the charges levelled by the Premier League, but refused to disclose the correspondence — requested by The Athletic — because it was determined that it could risk the UK’s relationship with the UAE.

In recent days, there have been the first indications of a response to the charges from some of those in Abu Dhabi. Etihad Airways, whose former long-term chairman Mohamed Al Mazrouei was also a City board member from 2010 until 2021, has threatened to sue the Premier League after its independent commission declared the club’s sponsorship agreements were “sham” deals. Etihad was not named in the report but is City’s foremost sponsor. It remains to be seen how far the club — and their ownership — are prepared to go in the quest to absolve themselves. Do their sponsors follow through with legal action? Will those long-term Emirati investments in Britain get called into question? Will all this be used as leverage to exert pressure on the UK government? Would the government be resilient to any pressure, should it arrive? With every next step, the spotlight on Burnham will only burn brighter. In June, during Al Mubarak’s annual interview with Manchester City’s own platforms, he said there is “no intention to sell” City. “Manchester City and this group within the football world is a pinnacle and these sorts of jewels you don’t sell,” the chairman insisted.

Davidson, however, argues recent events may prove a game-changer. “Once there’s some time to digest this, my feeling would be that they would extricate themselves,” he says. “I think primarily it would be seen from a political and cultural aspect. The ruling family of Abu Dhabi would feel that they had been embarrassed and disgraced by this ruling, and the best way of moving forward would be to sell now to cut the losses, as it were, rather than allow this to be a festering, lingering problem where the ownership of their club would be forever tainted in England. “I can’t see any scenario where they would continue.”