Manchester City is run by, and in the interests of, the United Arab Emirates, a state whose appetite for conflict and violence is matched by its contempt for rules and norms.
By Nick McGeehan, the director of FairSquare, which runs the rebootfifa.com campaign.
“Of course, we can do what we want.”
After 18 years, 25 trophies and 115 charges it really all comes down to those 8 words. Manchester City board member Simon Pearce wrote them in an email in 2013, Der Spiegel published them five years later and it has taken a further eight years for Manchester City to be held accountable for the rule breaking to which they referred, although perhaps it’s too soon for such optimistic assertions. When Manchester City board member Simon Pearce said “we”, he wasn’t actually talking about Manchester City, and the shock and disbelief that has accompanied the Premier League investigation’s damning findings on Manchester City’s conduct suggests that a lot of people still haven’t wrestled with the true nature of this ownership model.
It has been said many times before but it bears repeating that the Premier League isn’t dealing with a football club, it is dealing with a vastly powerful and extremely dangerous state whose appetite for conflict and violence is matched by its contempt for rules and norms. Simon Pearce does not work for Manchester City, he works for Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the all-powerful ruler of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). So does Manchester City chairman, Khaldoon Al-Mubarak, who serves as MBZ’s key advisor, and so too does Sheikh Mansour, MBZ’s younger brother, and the nominal owner of the City Football Group. It goes without saying that MBZ and his inner circle are unencumbered by anything as tedious as institutional checks and balances. The machine runs on power and loyalty.
Despite Manchester City’s claims that Sheikh Mansour owns the club in a private capacity, few contest the obvious truth that City is run by, and in the interests of, the UAE state. This is in large part thanks to the efforts of a band of critical sports journalists, who have refused to drink the UAE kool-aid, and have steadfastly poked and probed at City’s ownership model and general conduct. But as the years have passed, and City have established themselves as part of the European elite, references to the underlying problems have either slipped from view or been referred to in the shorthand of ‘human rights concerns’.
To be clear, reference to the UAE’s human rights record is better than no mention at all, but there is a problem with the use of such a reductive term because while it efficiently signals that bad stuff is happening, it doesn’t really explain how bad the stuff is, and it suggests that it’s happening far far away. This in turn creates a disconnect between the UAE’s supposedly sensible stewardship of Manchester City and the ruinous and destructive elements of its domestic and foreign policies.
City’s slick public relations machine and the flashing smile and gregarious charm of Khaldoon Al Mubarak have of course helped sell us the comfortable delusion that whatever is happening somewhere over there isn’t happening here. The reality, as should have been evident for a very long time but which this case is finally revealing in full, is that the UAE’s abuse of power is happening right on our doorstep, and it fits into a very clear pattern of conduct that has been on full display to anyone who cared to look. The tactics the UAE is now deploying in relation to Manchester City are the same ones the UAE has deployed in relation to, for example its role in the genocide in Sudan or its violation of a UN arms embargo in Libya. And time and time again those tactics have enabled the UAE to evade accountability for its serial rule-breaking, which runs the gamut from ‘concerted efforts to stop and frustrate’ Premier League investigation to human rights atrocities.
And we are talking about atrocities. How else does one describe “civilians forced to choose between starvation or eating animal feed; children subjected to mass rape; families ambushed and killed as they flee; and perpetrators calling for ‘extermination’.” That’s a description of the actions of the UAE-supported Rapid Support Forces in Sudan and it’s from the UK government, which knows full well that the UAE is fueling the world’s bloodiest conflict in open violation of another UN arms embargo, and that Manchester City’s owner Sheikh Mansour is the key interlocutor with the RSF. I once described MBZ as a “one-man military-industrial complex” but these days he is more like a modern-day Genghis Khan, deploying his country’s wealth (which the UAE elite have stolen, let us never forget, from its people) to empower any warlord or general willing to fall in line with the UAE’s dark vision for the world. Whether fueling conflict or actively undermining democracy, MBZ’s paranoid meddling has had devastating consequences in Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen.
MBZ may not have wreaked death and devastation on his own people, but Emiratis live in a deeply repressive surveillance state where they have been stripped of all their basic rights. If an Emirati wanted to complain about the fact that their country has become a haven for organised criminals, or that it opens its arms to the likes of Andrew Tate and Tommy Robinson they would likely find themselves facing the same fate as Ahmed Mansoor, an incalculably brave rights activist who was swallowed up by the UAE’s state security apparatus in 2017. Nobody has seen Mansoor since and nobody has spoken out since he disappeared. The one right that Emiratis do have, of course, is to gorge on the cheap and disposable labour provided by 8 million migrant workers who scrape a living, if not any sort of dignified life, on its sprawling construction sites or in its manicured homes.
All of which begs the question why the UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham responded to the news of the independent commission’s findings that City has cheated by saying that he would be “really concerned to lose them”. Burnham injected what he presumably felt was some balance into the discussion when he pointed to the UAE having been “such a huge partner in the building of modern Manchester.” Number ten later clarified that “if wrongdoing is established, those responsible should face the appropriate consequences.”
And yes it is true, the UAE’s joint property venture with Manchester City Council did result in the construction of some luxury flats in Manchester and helped regenerate a dilapidated part of the city. What Burnham didn’t mention, of course, is the findings of Manchester Offshored, the 2022 report by UK academics Jon Silver, Adam Leaver, and Richard Goulding, which found that the UAE got the land on the cheap, circumvented affordable housing regulations and siphoned all of its profits from the deal to entities registered in Jersey and therefore not subject to UK income tax. In FairSquare’s 2023 report on the UAE and Saudi takeovers of Manchester City and Newcastle United, “Easy Cities to Buy”, a councillor for Ancoats and Beswick, the ward where Manchester City’s Etihad stadium sits, railed at the consequences of the deal. “We have 14,000 people on the housing waiting list. When we approve luxury flats and money goes out of the country, or we lose money on the sale of council land, that’s money that could end up in the homelessness budget.”
Nor did Burnham mention the fact that the UAE is currently playing footsy with Nigel Farage and the far-right, that an ITV investigation recently revealed that the UAE deployed assassins to UK soil to surveil and possibly kill a UK citizen, that it has been implicated in the torture and mistreatment of scores of British citizens, one of whom it accused of being a British spy, and that it is strongly suspected of having orchestrated spyware attacks in 2020 and 2021 on Number 10 Downing Street, the office that Burnham now occupies. But as noted earlier, they have built some nice apartments.
The UAE’s remarkable superpower is that it consistently gets away with all of this behaviour. No matter how many rules it breaks, or the seriousness of those rules, no matter how many people get disappeared or tortured or executed or bombed or beaten or raped or massacred – and when we are talking about ‘human rights concerns’ in the context of the UAE, we really should use active verbs – its response is to deny wrongdoing, deploy PR, and use every ounce of political and economic leverage to evade public and legal accountability. This is what explains its approach to the Premier League’s investigation, and its belief in the likely success of its approach is based on hard evidence.
The colossal political failure of successive British governments is to have encouraged the UAE to weave itself into the fabric of British society despite the abundance of evidence showing it to be not only abusive, but predatory. Let us recall that in 2024, then PM Keir Starmer repeatedly evaded questions about the possibility of empowering the UK’s Independent Football Regulator to ban state ownership, and prior to this Boris Johnson’s UK government bent over backwards to ensure that another abusive dictatorship, Saudi Arabia, was allowed to take over Newcastle United.
It is truly remarkable that the first organisation to stand firm and tell the UAE that, no, it cannot do what it wants, is the Premier League. The UAE’s furious response – threatening to withdraw billions of pounds in invstment if the UK government doesn’t lean on an independent legal commission and nobble its findings – was entirely predictable and very much part of the UAE’s playbook. A key question now is whether the UK government sides with justice and accountability or throws its political support behind the UAE’s brand of mob rule. Whatever happens, we are seeing follies of allowing autocratic states to own football clubs unfold. And this is the moment where we need to put a stop to that, once and for all.
Josimar regularly opens its columns to independent guest contributors who wish to comment on the most pressing issues in world football. These columns solely reflect the opinion of their authors. Their publication does not constitute an endorsement on Josimar’s behalf, but a way to encourage and promote debate within the football community.
