Manchester City’s rise from stumbles of old to fine-tuned global product

When Sergio Agüero won the Premier League for Manchester City in the 94th minute of the last match of the 2011-12 season, the emotional extremes, how nearly they cocked it up, made a fevered connection with all the stumbles of the old club. City fans are pinching themselves again now at the prospect of a Champions League final within touching memory of a League One play-off final with Gillingham, but there can no longer be any illusion that this is the City of old.

Since 2008, after the takeover by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan of the Abu Dhabi ruling family, Manchester City have become an exercise in how to construct the supreme modern football club with vast money available for the project. And in the first season, as Mansour’s men and his multimillions rescued City from the chaos of ownership by the ousted Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, the ideal to replicate, Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona, was winning the Champions League.

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It has taken 13 years to cross that gulf, and £2.5bn or so of Abu Dhabi money, and from the start, unlikely as it may have seemed, this was the target of the new ownership: relentless, shimmering success.

As City and their dream teams have come to dominate, Amnesty and other human rights groups have taken to calling such mega-projects “sportswashing”, regimes laundering their reputations through the irresistible allure of football. That has never felt quite how Abu Dhabi sees itself, because although campaign groups have focused on the conditions for migrant workers, the suppression of internal dissent and the horrific war in Yemen, the state’s rulers appear to believe they are a relatively liberal regime, doing what they need to in a hazardous region, not in need of public relations cleansing.

The wealthiest of the seven United Arab Emirates because of its oil fortunes, Abu Dhabi is courted by western countries including Britain, which sells the country large stocks of arms. In December Boris Johnson hosted Abu Dhabi’s de facto ruler, Mansour’s brother, the crown prince Sheikh Mohamed, and the Downing Street communique enthused about “the long-standing friendship and shared history between our two countries and peoples”, before huge investment was announced in March.

Manchester City are, however, undoubtedly part of Abu Dhabi nation-building, woven into the strategy for diversifying its economy beyond the flows of oil prices, and projecting a modern, classy image to the world. City’s chairman, Khaldoon al-Mubarak, is responsible for key strategic government and business investment roles in Abu Dhabi, where he works principally not for Mansour but for Sheikh Mohamed.

Mubarak, appointed chairman within days of the shock takeover, was and still is the chairman of Abu Dhabi’s executive affairs authority, responsible for advising on the state’s direction and image, as well as a member of the governing executive council, and founder member of the supreme council for financial and economic affairs. In his official biography, the chairmanship of Manchester City, his most visible (and probably most enjoyable) role, comes low down, a part-time responsibility after being chief executive of the $243bn sovereign wealth investment company Mubadala, being on the board of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, and chairman of the Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank and Emirates Global Aluminium.

When the UAE made its accord with Israel last year brokered by Donald Tump, Manchester City’s chairman was with Sheikh Mohamed in the official government party hosting the first US-Israeli delegation. That is a sentence no City fan of any vintage can have imagined being written, when they were nursing pints in Moss Side’s Parkside pub, dreaming of one day forcing Peter Swales out.

The total reconstruction of City has been achieved like many industrial and prestige projects fashioned by Abu Dhabi in its few decades of compressed development, by employing the best resources and human expertise that money can pay for. Management consultants brought in immediately in 2008 to assess the task had Barcelona as the industry standard, and in 2012, just after the first title, City’s owners hired the know-how of Ferran Soriano and Txiki Begiristain, the former Barcelona chief executive and director of football respectively.

Waves of players had been bought to elevate the team, then the former Barcelona pair set their own imprints: acquiring a global network of clubs for the “City Football Group”, a worldwide commercial and youth development empire with the £200m academy “campus”, opened in 2014, at its apex. They knew to their fingertips that Guardiola was a coach on a different planet from his rivals, and City’s owners waited, putting everything in place, throughout the three title-winning seasons at Bayern Munich, before securing him in 2016.

One figure that records the cost of the City project is £1.3bn, the amount directly invested into the club as share capital by Mansour’s ownership vehicle. But that leaves out the vast sums from Abu Dhabi in sponsorships from other state-owned entities, principally the airline Etihad, whose £67.5m annual value became known through the fateful leaks of internal emails by the German magazine Spiegel. As early as 2013, when City began to face difficulties with Uefa’s financial fair play regulations, the sponsorships from three other Abu Dhabi entities, the investment firm Aabar, telecommunications giant Etisalat, and the country’s tourism authority, which had billboards around the Etihad Stadium inviting people to visit Abu Dhabi, were understood to be £15m, £16.5m, and £19.75m respectively: more than £50m in total. The breakdown of City’s huge annual commercial revenues – £246m last year – is not published, but if the Abu Dhabi sponsorships were to average £100m for every year of Mansour’s ownership, that would put the investment from the country at £2.6bn.

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City, of course, have made the final in a year when they would have been banned, had their lawyers not succeeded in overturning the penalties at the court of arbitration for sport. The regime, mostly classy in all areas including relations with supporters and investment in the community, lost that sure-footedness in its war with Uefa, raging that FFP rules and their enforcement by properly constituted internal bodies were a kind of European conspiracy against them. The counter-evidence, that owners pumping money in to inflate players’ wages and transfer fees is potentially ruinous, lies around Manchester for all to see, in the ruin of Bury and the traumatic administrations of Wigan and Bolton.

City’s owners misstepped again last month when they opted to join the toxic European Super League, and this time they quietly accepted the rebuke and sanctions from Uefa, and the welcome from Aleksander Ceferin back to the “European football family”. The short-lived breakaway uproar served as a reminder to the whole of football, City’s owners included, that the game’s historic governing bodies, imperfect as they will always be, are all a sport has to protect itself from being just a business, driven only by the impulse for revenues and global domination.

Yet Uefa’s Champions League final will broadcast to the world how far the game is from being a collection of sports clubs in any kind of even competition. Manchester City, the grand old club of latter-day cock-ups, are now the fine-tuned product of a country, playing oligarch-owned Chelsea for football’s ultimate prize.