In July 2016, the Manchester City player Yaya Touré ambled into a small bar near Beijing’s Workers’ Stadium and offered a bemused smile as dozens of Chinese fans rushed towards him.
Manchester City had just won their sixth trophy under the big-spending ownership of Sheikh Mansour’s Abu Dhabi United Group and the blues were international megastars. They were also magnets for investment.
On a trade mission led by Sir Howard Bernstein, the architect of modern Manchester, civic leaders rolled out club legends such as Mike Summerbee and Sun Jihai in a charm offensive to football-mad Chinese businessmen who saw that the club and the city were on the rise.
A decade on, Manchester is transformed. Estate agents advertise £15,000-a-month penthouses in a city-region growing faster economically than any other in Britain, while the success of “Manchesterism” has powered its mayor, Andy Burnham, to Downing Street.
Yet the city’s close ties with Abu Dhabi United Group are now facing fresh scrutiny, after Manchester City’s owners were found guilty of more than 100 breaches of Premier League financial rules.
In a surprising intervention on Wednesday, Burnham praised Abu Dhabi United Group as “such a huge partner in the building of modern Manchester” and that he would be “really concerned” to lose them as the club’s owners.
The prime minister went on to say that he would not get involved in the Premier League’s disciplinary process, but appeared to express some sympathy for City’s plight by referring to a similar investigation into Everton, the club he supports.
“I remember people proclaiming Everton guilty at the time and, with hindsight, I think more people would say that wasn’t fair the way that was handled,” he said.
Burnham’s comments raised eyebrows given the continuing disciplinary process – the Premier League is considering a range of sanctions – and because it turned the spotlight on to Abu Dhabi United Group’s wider investments in Greater Manchester, where he was mayor from 2017 until June this year.
One Burnham ally said it was “absolutely mad” for the prime minister to comment and risk being seen to be influencing a disciplinary process, describing it as his “biggest mistake so far”.
In an attempt to clarify the prime minister’s remarks on Thursday, a No 10 spokesperson said: “As the prime minister made clear, the initial judgment is serious and there can’t be any suggestion that anyone is above the rules. He also stressed that it is an ongoing independent process.
“It is essential that it is allowed to run its course and the outcome respected. Wherever wrongdoing is established, those responsible should face the appropriate consequences.”
When Sheikh Mansour’s Abu Dhabi group took over Manchester City in 2008, the grounds for success had already been laid.
The club had a gleaming new stadium, built with taxpayers’ money for the Commonwealth games just four years earlier, and council bosses were eager for a reliable long-term investor in a city battling the financial crash.
In 2014, Manchester city council announced a “£1bn deal” with City’s owner, Sheikh Mansour, one of the world’s richest men, to transform a large stretch of land between the stadium and the edge of the city centre. Richard Leese, then the council leader, promised it to be “a world-class exemplar of regeneration”.
The partnership between the council and Manchester City’s owner, which was called Manchester Life, included more than 1,000 private rented apartments and 395 built-for-sale homes – but not one social or affordable home.
In a sharply critical assessment of the Manchester Life partnership published in 2024, researchers at the University of Sheffield said it appeared that the council had leased the land to Abu Dhabi at a much cheaper rate than many comparable developments – they had “sold the family silver too cheaply”, the academics said – and did not appear to be receiving any rental income or revenue from the property sales.
All of the property, with an estimated worth of £350m, is controlled by Jersey-domiciled subsidiaries and ultimately owned by Abu Dhabi interests, the researchers found.
They described it as a “transfer of public wealth to private hands that is difficult to justify as prudent”.
Dr Richard Goulding, who co-authored the University of Sheffield research, said on Thursday that the Manchester Life development raised “questions about what type of Britain we’re trying to build and who the type of Manchester that we’ve built works for”.
He added: “On the one hand, [the Abu Dhabi deal] was bringing money in. On the other hand, a lot of that money was flowing into flats whose rents, according to our research, are being taken offshore.”
In July, Manchester city council published a review of its deals with private developers. It found that while these agreements had delivered “significant benefits”, there were “weaknesses in documentation, monitoring and assurance”, particularly around the profit-sharing nature of these deals.
A Manchester city council spokesperson said: “We do not recognise the criticisms linked to the disposal of public land and the idea that there is no financial benefit to the council through this partnership.
“The tired claim that working in partnership with Manchester City FC’s owners has not been a good deal for the council or the city has been debunked repeatedly. It is a one-sided perspective that fails to take into account the positive impact of investment in Ancoats and New Islington as well as the wider east Manchester area.”
The council added: “Claims that some land was sold too cheaply to Manchester Life ignore the fact that there was zero market interest at the time of the sale, that the land is worth more now precisely because of Manchester Life’s investment and the significant financial return the council is receiving through profit-sharing arrangements.”
Gleaming skyscrapers have transformed Manchester’s skyline over the past decade, when the city’s population has grown by nearly 100,000 people and become one of Europe’s most attractive destinations for foreign money.
Yet born-and-bred Mancunians have felt increasingly pushed out. A report published earlier this year by Greater Manchester Combined Authority, which Burnham led until June, revealed that of the 10,974 homes built across the region in the nine years to 2024, only 679 (6%) were classed as affordable.
Hayley Flynn, an anti-gentrification campaigner who leads tours of Manchester, said development of luxury flats in Ancoats, the home of Abu Dhabi’s Manchester Life project, had not benefited the area’s existing community.
“What provisions have we got for them? They’re not going to spend £7 on a loaf of bread in Pollen [a trendy bakery], but that’s their nearest bakery,” she said. “All these apartments for influencers – it’s quite a forceful erosion that’s just pushing the community out.”
Tim Heatley, a co-founder of the Manchester developer Capital & Centric, said the city had benefited from Abu Dhabi’s riches and that the success of City had “put Manchester on the map internationally”.
Under the ownership of Sheikh Mansour, Manchester City won eight Premier League titles, four FA Cups, seven League Cups and one Champions League, becoming one of the world’s elite clubs.
The club, which continues to deny any wrongdoing, won eight trophies, including three Premier League titles between 2009 and 2018, the period under investigation.
Heatley said Abu Dhabi had “a major impact on that particular area of the city” between the Etihad Stadium and Manchester city centre, but that he believed the region’s economic upturn would have happened without the football investment.
