The leaked emails and documents that set Manchester City’s current crisis in motion were published by Der Spiegel in 2018, and for the Guardian columnist Jonathan Liew it is the tone of the club’s internal communications, as much as their content, that stands out. City chairman Khaldoon al-Mubarak, a trusted adviser to the royal family of the United Arab Emirates, was said to prefer to spend 30 million on the 50 best lawyers in the world to sue Uefa for the next 10 years than to accept a fine.
In the same tranche of documents, City’s lawyer Simon Cliff asserted that Uefa ‘doesn’t respond to anything other than aggression’ and threatened the governing body of European football, which was pursuing the club over alleged financial irregularities at the time, with the destruction of its rules and organisation.
Liew notes the incongruity of such rhetoric being deployed in defence of a club’s right to sign a player such as Jack Rodwell, and accepts that the case sits awkwardly between legal arcana and genuine significance. But his argument is that the City case runs deeper than one club, one league or even one sport: it is, he writes, a parable of power.
City are not simply a football club but a cultural asset majority-owned by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the deputy prime minister of the UAE and brother of its president. Since the Premier League announced the charges against the club in 2023, the matter has been discussed at diplomatic as well as boardroom level. Liew points to a Bloomberg report last month that UAE officials warned an adverse verdict against City could threaten billions in Emirati investment in the United Kingdom, with bilateral trade between the two countries nudging above £25bn in 2025.
For Liew, the logical starting point is how ridiculous it is that the country’s foreign relations are effectively being negotiated in a football tribunal, and that the UK’s clean-energy transition should be contingent on whether a panel decides that Roberto Mancini’s coaching contract was fair. He argues this is one reason it was a bad idea for the Premier League to allow entire states to invest in football clubs, since questions of sporting merit and integrity were always going to become entangled with diplomacy and hard power.
That entanglement is visible, in his reading, in the statement City released on Friday night, which respected the integrity of the legal process while obliquely questioning it and invoked 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, the club sought to discredit the league’s basic governance model by arguing that the two-thirds majority required for motions to pass represented the tyranny of the majority, which, Liew writes, gives a good idea of what Abu Dhabi thinks of basic democracy.
Liew also notes that the club’s majority owner is a country which, according to the United Nations’ own reports, is defying arms embargos in Sudan and Libya, and which Human Rights Watch holds responsible for widespread acts of political repression and rights abuses. From years of warlike rhetoric, veiled threats, legal challenges and poisonous off-record briefings, he argues, City’s approach consists in part of discrediting the very idea that anyone is fit to regulate them. He accepts there is a genuine belief behind some of this: that football’s financial regulations, largely non-existent 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 Roman Abramovich-era Chelsea.
City and Abu Dhabi are not the only targets of the argument. Liew points to the Saudi-run Newcastle United and to the opaque private-equity funds that now run most of their rivals, and notes that Jeff Bezos is part of a consortium that owns almost 40% of Liverpool. He sets such owners alongside Meta, Elon Musk, Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump as an entire class of men who recognise no authority beyond their own, for whom politics, business, sport and culture are essentially the same substance.
The wider significance of the case, he argues, lies beyond the interminable debate over relegation, stripped titles and trophies. In a world where the United Nations is neutered and transnational alliances have scarcely been weaker, he writes, it articulates the increasingly outmoded idea that there is a shared set of values and rules by which all must abide. The case is not over: City continue to deny any wrongdoing, and Liew expects appeals upon appeals, possibly ending in the high court many years from now, alongside diplomatic representations and high-level deals. His conclusion is that it is in the interests not only of City’s rivals and of football itself, but of everyone with an interest in the rule of law, that they do not succeed.