Khaldoon al-Mubarak occupies a position unlike any other in English football. As chair of Manchester City he fronts an Abu Dhabi-owned club; away from it he is chief adviser to the UAE president and ruler of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Mohamed Bin Zayed al-Nahyan. He appears to have driven City’s confrontational approach with the football authorities, and if the club lose their appeal against an independent commission’s finding that they were guilty of multiple breaches of financial rules, he may be instructed to organise the sale of the club.
His family history is inseparable from the story of the United Arab Emirates, a nation state still only 55 years old. His father, ambassador Khalifa Ahmed Abdel Aziz al-Mubarak, left the family’s Paris apartment for work on 9 February 1984 and was assassinated on the street; Khaldoon was eight at the time. The killing was carried out by a group led by Abu Nidal, which the CIA described as the most dangerous and effective of all terrorist groups and the best organised of the radical Palestinian groups before the emergence of Hamas. The murder was justified in a phone call claiming the UAE had expelled Palestinian and Arab residents and was linked with American imperialism — in essence, the accusation was that the country was too soft on the west and not radical enough for the Palestinians.
His paternal grandfather, Ahmad Bin Abdul Aziz al-Mubarak, chaired Abu Dhabi’s Sharia judicial department and served as a senior adviser to Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, the founding president of the UAE, crafting the Islamic legal framework of the new nation in the 1970s. Streets in Abu Dhabi are named after both his father and his grandfather, and his father is honoured as a martyr of the state. Given that history, the royal family is said to have looked out for al-Mubarak as a quasi-adopted son. He first worked for Sheikh Mohamed Bin Zayed after graduating from Tufts University in Massachusetts, and a source in the Financial Times describes him as “diplomatically in charge of the UK file as well as the China file” and “the main liaison with the US administration”. He has diplomatic immunity in the UK.
That said, al-Mubarak appears to have made a rare misstep with his belligerent tone over City’s battles with the football authorities. According to Manchester City’s lawyer Simon Cliff, it was al-Mubarak who dictated the aggressive, confrontational stance the club have taken. As far back as 2014, when City were fighting their first Uefa charge, Cliff wrote, in leaked documents first published by Der Spiegel: “Khaldoon says he would rather spend £30m on the 50 best lawyers in the world and sue them [Uefa] for the next ten years than agree a financial penalty.”
He backed down on that occasion. City, along with the co-accused Paris Saint-Germain, agreed a small fine and minor transfer restrictions with Uefa. What followed is what makes City’s continued fighting extraordinary. The Qatar-owned PSG accepted their punishment, cozied up to Uefa — the club’s president, Nasser al-Khelaifi, became chair of the European Club Association, now European Football Clubs, and a chief opponent of the breakaway Super League — and built the most exciting and successful team in Europe, bringing admiration for the Qatari brand among observers willing to ignore human rights abuses. In fighting to the end with City, al-Mubarak appears to have broken an ambassador’s cardinal law: don’t embarrass your boss.
Should City lose their appeal, the consequence may be withdrawal rather than persistence. Christopher Davidson, author of Abu Dhabi, Oil and Beyond, believes a sale is likely. “I’m sure that’s the case with Man City,” he says. “More than that, I’ve been told by some [in Abu Dhabi] that it will be the case. I can’t see any reason why they would stick around and try to rebuild the reputation after this. It’s embarrassing the royal family now. I can’t think of any example where things have gone wrong [for Abu Dhabi] and they’ve just kept plugging money into it. I think they’ll play out the appeal — nothing to lose with that — but once that’s done, it’s all about how to get out before the owners are declared unfit, a far worse outcome.” He adds that there are very clever people involved in Abu Dhabi who, he is led to believe, will very strongly counsel that this needs to be a quiet retreat, because the longer the owners stay in the game the more damaging it becomes, unravelling any soft power Abu Dhabi has managed to gain.
Davidson nonetheless thinks the wider threat to UK–Abu Dhabi relations is overstated, and that the emirate’s interests should not be portrayed as monolithic. Large and growing sections of Abu Dhabi’s state economy sit outside al-Mubarak’s remit. Some of Abu Dhabi’s biggest UK investments in recent years have come through renewable energy and the windfarms of Scotland, run by Masdar energy, chaired by Sultan al-Jaber, another key lieutenant of the ruler. Davidson also cites the International Holding Company (IHC), which has huge biotech, shipping, healthcare and retail investments in the UK, including the Ivy restaurants, and is chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al-Nahyan, deputy ruler of Abu Dhabi and brother of the UAE president and Sheikh Mansour. “It’s inconceivable that these investments would be withdrawn,” Davidson says. In May this year the UK signed a free trade agreement with Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which it said could be worth £3.7bn a year to the UK economy — a deal the UAE was a major force behind, and one Davidson sees no prospect of being interfered with.
Al-Mubarak will probably emerge from the fiasco largely untarnished, because City are a tiny part of his portfolio. “He can’t possibly have known what’s going on in every part of his empire,” Davidson says. “My gut feeling would be that it’s the layers below him. It’s all about your legal counsel. I think the Qataris had very clever people working for them. This has been a case of poor advice being given to the senior Emiratis involved, a misreading of UK politics and a misreading of the Premier League and its bigger picture as a rules-based institution.” Davidson argues that the statements al-Mubarak has made — including, in June, that “these sorts of jewels, you don’t sell” and that there was “only intention to keep growing this” — are themselves the product of poor advice delivered to him and ultimately to Sheikh Mansour, and that while the fate of Manchester City may matter a great deal in the UK, it has been a peripheral project for Abu Dhabi.