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.
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. 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.
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