The cache of leaked emails and documents that would eventually lead to the crisis in which Manchester City are now embroiled was published by Der Spiegel in 2018, and often it was the tone of the club’s communications that was as startling as their content. Of City chairman Khaldoon al-Mubarak, a trusted adviser to the royal family of the United Arab Emirates, it was said that he would “rather spend 30 million on the 50 best lawyers in the world to sue [Uefa] for the next 10 years” than accept a fine.
In the same tranche of documents, City lawyer Simon Cliff asserts that “Uefa doesn’t respond to anything other than aggression”, and threatens the governing body of European football – who were pursuing City over alleged financial irregularities at the time – with “the destruction of their rules and organisation”.
All of which feels like a rather extreme way of ensuring that your football club has the right to sign Jack Rodwell from Everton. And, yes, this is one of those stories in which the deeply serious and the deeply trivial, the universal and the parochial, are not always easy to tell apart. From a safe distance, the news that one of English football’s most successful clubs has been found guilty of more than 100 charges of financial irregularity may feel like so much so-what, a thicket of sporting arcana that even devoted fans occasionally struggle to parse. But, of course, the City case goes deeper than one club, one league, even one sport. Fundamentally, it is a parable of power.
After all, this is not simply a football club but a beloved cultural asset that happens to be majority-owned by the billionaire Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, deputy prime minister of the UAE and brother of the president. Since the Premier League announced the charges against City in 2023, the case has been discussed not merely at boardroom level but at a diplomatic level. Just last month, Bloomberg reported UAE officials warning that an adverse verdict against City could threaten billions in Emirati investment in the UK. Bilateral trade between the countries nudged above £25bn in 2025.
And perhaps the logical starting point here is to observe just how ridiculous it is that this country’s foreign relations are effectively being negotiated in a football tribunal. That the UK’s clean-energy transition is somehow contingent on whether a panel decides whether Roberto Mancini’s coaching contract was fair or not. This was one of the reasons why it was such a bad idea for the Premier League to allow entire states to invest in football clubs. Over time it was inevitable that questions of sporting merit and integrity would become entangled with questions of diplomacy and hard power; that footballing warfare would increasingly come to resemble the real thing.
We caught a glimpse of this in the bellicose statement City released on Friday night, respecting the integrity of the legal process while also obliquely questioning it, invoking the Premier League’s duty “to behave as an independent, impartial and fair-minded regulator, free from partisan influence”. In 2024, in a separate case against the Premier League, City tried to discredit the league’s basic governance model, arguing that the two-thirds majority required for motions to pass represented “the tyranny of the majority”, which gives you a good idea of what Abu Dhabi thinks of basic democracy.
At this point we should probably recall that this is a football club majority-owned by a country that, according to the UN’s own reports, is defying arms embargos in Sudan and Libya, and that, according to Human Rights Watch, is responsible for widespread acts of political repression and rights abuses. From the years of warlike rhetoric, veiled threats, legal challenges and poisonous off-record briefings, City’s approach appears to consist, in part, of discrediting the very idea that anyone is fit to regulate it.
In one respect, this stems from a genuine belief that football’s financial regulations – largely nonexistent in the decade after the Premier League’s foundation in 1992 – were designed to protect elite wealth while extinguishing new-money challengers such as City and the Chelsea of Roman Abramovich. But to follow this thread to its logical conclusion is essentially an argument for a world in which there are no legitimate checks on power – where you can do what you want, however you want, for as long as you want, for whatever purpose you want; where the only meaningful rules of the game are power and leverage; where you would rather destroy your enemies than accept even the slightest curb on your volition.
And, of course, there is little sense in singling out City or Abu Dhabi here. From City and the Saudi-run Newcastle United to the opaque private-equity funds that now run most of their rivals, the top end of English football is essentially owned by bored men given more money than they can possibly know what to do with and more power than it is ever advisable to invest in a single human being.
after newsletter promotion
For Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia you might just as easily read Jeff Bezos, part of a consortium that now owns almost 40% of Liverpool FC. Or Meta, or Elon Musk, or Benjamin Netanyahu, or Donald Trump: an entire class of men who recognise no authority beyond their own, for whom politics and business and sport and culture are essentially the same basic substance – a game to be brought to heel by any means necessary.
This is the broader significance of the City verdict, beyond the interminable debate over whether the club should be forcibly relegated, stripped of titles and trophies. In a world where the UN is neutered, where transnational alliances have scarcely been weaker, it offers an alternative vision to a world increasingly aligned along axes of brute power and wealth. It articulates the increasingly outmoded idea that there is a shared set of values and rules by which all must abide.
And clearly this case is not over yet. City continue to deny any wrongdoing. Doubtless there will be appeals upon appeals, perhaps even ending in the high court many years hence. Doubtless there are diplomatic representations to be made, high-level deals to be brokered, realpolitik to be waged. After all, geopolitics, like football, is very much a results business.
But it is in the interests not just of City’s rivals and not just of football itself, but of everyone with an interest in the rule of law that they do not succeed.
