Its UAE sugar daddy is not the type you want in the goalmouth when the governance axe falls

Manchester City are top of the table eight games into the 2026/27 Premier League season, yet relegation looms over the team like a dark cloud. In September, after years of investigation and litigation, an independent panel found the footballing giant guilty of breaching financial fair play rules no fewer than 114 times. There will be an appeal, but sooner or later a hard rain’s gonna fall: massive fines, stripped titles, points deductions and possibly even expulsion.

In 2008, the club was purchased by the Abu Dhabi United Group, the private equity firm controlled by Sheikh Mansour Zayed Al Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Since then, Mansour has ploughed billions of pounds into Manchester City, in one of the most controversial cases of international sportswashing. After winning the Premier League in 2012, the Blues have claimed six more league titles and 15 cup titles, including the much-prized Uefa Champions League trophy.

The basis of the recent guilty verdict is that the club achieved all this by misrepresenting direct equity funding as sponsorship revenue. But the difficult question for Cityzens to answer — where does the money come from? — is not about technicalities, as scandalous as they may be. Guardian sportswriter Barney Ronay puts it like this: “How would you feel if the owner of the football club you support was implicated in famine, ethnic cleansing and the deaths of 150,000 men, women and children?”

Ronay is referring to the genocide in Darfur and the established connections between the UAE and the Rapid Support Forces of Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo in what is effectively “a proxy war for regional powers”. Mansour has met Gen Hamdan on numerous occasions, and it is almost certain (despite repeated denials) that the Abu Dhabi royal family has supplied weapons and resources to an army responsible for mass killings and the displacement of more than 12-million people in Sudan.

This is not just a case of player transfers and stadium development being funded by dirty oil money. And the accusation is more specific than vague concerns about human rights restrictions in a monarchical society, or “a corporate war-laundering scheme”, or “a bank that owns a fund”, Ronay insists. It is about a direct connection to war crimes: “Club owner. Government. Football match. Bodies. The choice is simple. You either care or you don’t.”

Many people in the UK do care. Last year activists staged protests outside Manchester City’s homeground, the Etihad Stadium, and petitions to the Premier League demanding action against Mansour have gained thousands of signatures. The advocacy group Manchester4Sudan was formed to help Sudanese refugees and raise awareness about the genocide.

This is not just a case of player transfers and stadium development being funded by dirty oil money. .... It is about a direct connection to war crimes.

Yet it must be said that most people, especially in Manchester, are grateful for the investment and less inclined to look into the source of the funds. Even Manchester United fans — who have complained as bitterly as other clubs about the delay in resolving the financial charges against City — generally accept that Abu Dhabi’s football spending has complemented a wider process of urban renewal, greening and development.

Greater Manchester has offered itself as a socioeconomic good news story in a country that needs them. For years the UK, directionless and leaderless, has drifted between populist lies (as evidenced by Brexit and an obsession with “small boats”) and a Conservative agenda that has widened the wealth gap and gutted social services. Keir Starmer bungled his chance when the Labour Party won a landslide victory in 2024, joining a parade of failed British prime ministers.

Enter Andy Burnham. Despite having a series of ministerial appointments and shadow secretary roles on his resumé, Burnham’s main qualification for the top job was his tenure as mayor of Greater Manchester. It remains to be seen whether his record as a champion of local government translates into real statesmanship, but by focusing on practical issues — housing, transport, the cost of living — without scapegoating migrants or reinscribing Britain’s class hierarchy, Burnham has already shown the kind of leadership the UK needs.

Asked for his response to Manchester City’s alleged sham contracts, the new prime minister indicated that he would not want to intervene in Premier League disciplinary processes. Nevertheless, he added, the Abu Dhabi United Group has been “a huge partner in the building of modern Manchester”; he was “really concerned” about the Independent Football Regulator’s desire to undertake further investigation into the club’s ownership.

Of course, the turnaround in Greater Manchester predates the contributions of both Burnham and Mansour by decades. When I spent some time in the city during a sweltering July, I had an opportunity to learn more about its past and about the trajectory that has made it the UK’s most desirable city to live in (according to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s 2025 Global Liveability Index, among various other measures).

Serendipitously, I booked a stay with Edward Faherty, who — apart from taking in Airbnb guests — is a project manager in Manchester City Council’s Parks Service. In his account, one of the key early factors in the redevelopment of the city was the Irish Republican Army bombing during the Euro 96 Football Championship. Though no lives were lost, the bomb laid waste to a large area and the city received hundreds of millions of pounds in compensation, leading to ambitious reconstruction.

Cultural shifts in the 1990s were also significant. While the economic impact of Margaret Thatcher’s “war on the north” — the labour union disputes, the closure of mines and factories — was still acutely felt, new opportunities grew in unexpected places. The BBC consolidated regional services in Manchester and built new studios. Britpop became a global phenomenon. Faherty reminded me that, though the city is strongly associated with the band Oasis and the Gallagher brothers, the music boom started in the late 1980s with the acid house scene, as bands such as The Stone Roses and venues like The Hacienda spurred the advent of “Madchester”.

There was also significant infrastructural expenditure in advance of the 2002 Commonwealth Games, which centred on the new City of Manchester Stadium (later to become the Etihad). “We were still hit quite hard by the 2008 downturn and then the change in government that followed,” noted Faherty. To many in this Labour stronghold, he explained, it felt like “a sort of punishment” when the Conservatives came to power and first David Cameron, then Theresa May, imposed austerity programmes.

Despite this, Conservative candidates partially dismantled Labour’s “red wall” in 2019 and 2021. The wall has now been rebuilt, though Faherty warned that Labour today is “too closely associated with middle-class, comfortably employed, upwardly mobile The Guardian readers rather than the working-class people who are historically the party’s real base”. If I were a British voter, I admit, I would be in the former camp.

I do love The Guardian. But when it was founded as The Manchester Guardian in 1821, it was the voice of cotton merchants and mill owners and slave traders, not of labourers. The paper became more left-leaning over time and was even viewed as radical under some editors in the late 19th century — just as nowadays it is annoyingly “woke” to reactionaries and right-wingers. For most of its years in print, The Guardian has been a publication by and for liberals, carrying all the contradictions implied by that capacious term.

In this way, caught between a progressive political agenda and a more cautious alliance with the monied establishment, The Guardian represents the ideological clash at the heart of Manchester’s history and its identity today. When Karl Marx visited Manchester in the 1840s and 1850s, he stayed with his friend Friedrich Engels, who came from a prosperous mercantile milieu and had been sent to England by his father to work as a clerk in their textile business.

Engels was raised to be a rapacious capitalist, so it was a great disappointment to his family when he produced his 1845 book The Condition of the Working Class in England, exposing the lie that the Industrial Revolution had improved the general population’s quality of life. Workers were exploited by the bourgeoisie, lived in slums and had appalling mortality rates.

Though Engels was complicit in all this as a member of the “possessing class”, his analysis was greatly admired by Marx. The two of them collaborated on The Communist Manifesto and what would become Das Kapital, with its central insights into the ever-widening inequality between the minority who own the means of production and the majority who have nothing to sell but their labour.

Manchester cherishes the symbol of the bee, which was first included in the city’s coat of arms in 1842. In retrospect, it seems like an insult that the busy worker bees were invoked in this way when the hives were sites of such greed and deprivation. But over time the story of working-class oppression and resilience has been turned into a marketable urban brand. Bee and hive motifs, for instance, are regularly incorporated into the Manchester City kit design.

Slavery and empire generated enormous wealth for Britain, but it took a long time for these ill-gotten gains to bring about widespread improvements in the welfare of the UK’s poor and working classes. Arguably this really occurred only at the tail end of the colonial era.

Faherty and I talked about his portfolio — Manchester’s green spaces — and the significant amount of money that Mansour and company have poured into the expanding Etihad Campus of sports facilities and parks to the east of the city. Two centuries ago, the eastern edges of England’s northern cities were preferred locations for mills and factories because of the prevailing western wind. When these closed, the former industrial areas became derelict. Manchester has famously cleaned up its canals and turned polluted wastelands into thriving parklands; the Etihad Campus extension is seen as a continuation of that process.

Still, I wonder, is this just a case of greenwashing compounding sportswashing? Or, viewed another way, is it merely reproducing the phenomenon of Britons (including the working class) benefiting, directly or indirectly, from the suffering of people in Africa or Asia? Ronay writes that the UAE is “hugely present in British life as an ally and a sugar daddy”. Should collective wellbeing in Manchester have to come with human rights abuses in Sudan and Abu Dhabi? Moreover, as a recent The Guardian exposé shows, the UAE’s dodgy investments in Manchester real estate have arguably deepened inequality by funding high-end living and not (as promised) affordable housing.

Yet the battle for the soul of Manchester has other dimensions to it. Despite Burnham’s popularity as mayor, general disillusionment with Starmer’s Labour allowed other parties to make inroads here. While the Greens carry the torch of Marx, Engels and Emmeline Pankhurst, it is the xenophobic and generally bigoted Reform UK that threatens to capture the imagination of an electorate primed by centuries of British jingoism. Cosmopolitan, multiracial, integrated Greater Manchester must succeed.

When you take a tour of the Etihad and enter the inner sanctum, the dressing room, you are greeted by a line from poet Tony Walsh: “Some are born here, some drawn here, but we all call it home.” Is this just a nice gesture to the multimillionaire football stars who have arrived from other clubs and countries? The significance of the poem to the people of Manchester would suggest otherwise.

Walsh wrote This Is the Place in 2012 for Forever Manchester, a foundation that raises money for community projects across the city. It’s a rollicking, rhythmical paean to his hometown. When he read it at a vigil for the victims of the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017, the poem became more than that — it expressed a shared commitment not to allow the attack to reinforce Islamophobic tropes, which would be caving to the small-islandism of Reform and those further to the right on the political spectrum.

This Is the Place is a vision of Manchester worth affirming, and it is one that Manchester City promotes in many ways. Does all this make up for the UAE’s exercise of soft power, or indeed its enrichment via the conversion of Manchester City into a huge (and ultimately illegitimate) commercial enterprise? The question nags and the final answer is surely no.