On the pitch, Manchester City impressed everybody last season. Now let’s take a look behind the scenes – on the men who own the club.
By Nicholas McGeehan
The trailer for the forthcoming Amazon Prime documentary ‘All or Nothing: Manchester City’ is out and it’s hard to escape the feeling that they came mighty close to calling it ‘Death or Glory: Manchester City’s Band of Brothers.’ Overlaid by a drum-heavy score, it features General Pep Guardiola drawing up his battle plans, exhorting his weary and injured troops in the dressing room – “we are close, we are so close” – before proudly surveying his platoon’s triumphant victory away to Stoke City.
Regrettably, Netflix have yet to approach me with an offer to fund my own counterproject, ‘The Men Behind Manchester City’, leaving me with no option but to reveal details of the second episode, provisionally titled ‘The Kids Are Not Alright.’ Whereas Amazon’s documentary draws on the tone and genre conventions of the modern war movie, viewers of my project are more likely to see parallels with themes from 1980s American soap-operas, although ironically it is my documentary that contains all the death and the stomach-churning violence. Episode 1 was based around the bombshell revelation that Manchester City is not actually run by Sheikh Mansour Al Nahyan but by his more powerful and more dangerous older brother, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, and it argued that the club’s rise to the top of the European game reflects the efforts of a gang of cash-hungry, blood-thirsty statesmen to extend their network of power and influence, aided and abetted by shape-shifting public relations advisors. Episode 2 brings our other key actors into play: Abu Dhabi’s junior partner i...
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