The 1st of July 2003. If you’re unsure of the significance of this date, it was the day that Ken Bates officially sold Chelsea football club to Roman Abramovich.
On the 29th September 2026 Manchester City were found guilty of financial impropriety by the Premier League between 2009 and 2018. Mostly for paying staff members undeclared salaries and “sham” payments from state owned Abu Dhabi sponsors. It was a day I and many others started to doubt would arrive.
When City’s guilt was announced, I thought back to the landscape immediately before Abramovich’s arrival. Some would argue that the Premier League was on track to become the grotesquely rapacious entity it is today – irrespective of Abramovich’s takeover of Chelsea. Politically the country was, and still is, wedded to Thatcherism and Blairism’s obsession with courting private wealth to drive growth, rather than through domestic productivity. Everything had a price.
My recollection – this outcome didn’t feel inevitable pre-Abramovich. Virtually all English clubs were owned by British businessmen, many of them having supported that club their entire lives. There are countless examples. Alan Sugar at Spurs. David Moores at Liverpool and Martin Edwards at Manchester United both inherited their majority shareholdings from family. Arsenal had been owned by the Hill-Wood family for most of the twentieth century and of course Jack Walker at Blackburn Rovers. It was Walker who created the template that Abramovich’s Chelsea and then Abu Dhabi’s Manchester City would borrow: an owner ploughing in personal funds to increase the club’s spending capability, to the point where it greatly exceeded its rivals, as a shortcut to contention and eventually silverware.
But this is where intent matters. None of the British owners mentioned above mendaciously used these clubs to launder state reputations, gain political influence or ingratiate themselves in the upper echelons of society. Indeed Sugar, Moores and Edwards were all somewhat disliked by their respective fanbases for various reasons. They were living their dream – to paraphrase Peter Risdale – as fans trying to help their club succeed. Being the person whose decisions led to it was a form of egotism everyone could comprehend. Most would do it too – if they could afford it.
Speaking of Risdale, he’s an example that having a real fan in charge of a club’s purse could be destructive. He almost bankrupted Leeds United, and saw them relegated, by using club debt to fund lavish spending beyond its means. It’s one of the reasons why the Premier League’s profit and sustainability rules exists today – to dissuade individuals from going rogue and spending money that is not theirs, and in extreme cases jeopardising a football club’s existence.
Abramovich’s arrival, and its hyper-inflationary distortion on football, is another reason. His goals were wholly individual and not collective. This was a foreign Oligarch with no connection to London, never mind Chelsea FC, who amassed billions from the loans-for-shares privatization program, right after the fall of the Soviet Union and its chaotic and clumsy shift from a communist to capitalist system. He bought Chelsea to diversify and cleanse the money made from ill-gotten gains. What better way to win over the British establishment than with flattery – specifically appealing to the city of London’s sense of exceptionalism by parking a lot of his money here in Blighty. With over two billion pounds spent buying Chelsea and financing transfer spending and player salaries, pocket change to Abramovich, his name is still sung by their fans. Only Vladimir Putin ruined it for Roman by invading Ukraine.
Autocratic petrostates were watching and now felt they could do far more than just emulate Abramovich. Given its global appeal, being allowed to own a Premier League club is an effective means to legitimize, even glamorise, your brand of state autocracy. A pre-requisite for this to succeed – operating in an openly corrupt way has to appear desirable. It helped Abu Dhabi’s cause that the football authorities were apathetic about fairness and integrity for so long, while investing in UK infrastructure projects curried favour with the political classes. Modern fandom’s transactional slavishness assisted the objective too – if simpletons equate cheating to flash big money signings and success on the pitch, morals become optional and they’ll bend the knee. Still, for this to work optimally, it’s not just about buying a club. It had to be one that was success starved, and ideally had a massive inferiority complex. Manchester City fit both criteria perfectly.
American billionaires also saw the immense commercial opportunity of the Premier League and wanted their slice. Everyone who mattered was making bank; clubs, players, agents, sponsors and TV rights holders. Few asked questions. Existing club owners or fans were too blinded by the inflation in club valuations or tribalistic self-interest to care that the Premier League had started to court people with no scruples.
Did the Premier League and successive UK governments truly want this reckoning? Would the Premier League’s or UEFA’s investigations into Manchester City’s finances have occurred without investigative German publication Der Spiegel and Portuguese hacker and journalist Rui Pinto? Of course not. Emails they leaked exposed the scale of the financial deceit and the contempt of Manchester City’s owners and administrators towards the rules.
It would be far easier to ignore the misdeeds of City’s owners given the political difficulties and legal challenges that will inevitably come in the event of their dismissal from professional football. Andy Burnham’s comments revealed where his priorities lie, and the corrupting influence of foreign wealth on our politicians – that he would be “really concerned to lose them” if Abu Dhabi were to withdraw investments from the UK due to sporting sanctions, as they were a “huge partner in the building of modern Manchester”.
If not for the leaks, I suspect City would’ve gotten away with it. That’s why Abu Dhabi are so irate. Being publicly rebuked plays its part. Nobody in Abu Dhabi would dare. They also did everything that was expected of them to be excused their misdeeds. Done methodically, with panache, the plucky underdog becoming top dog narrative was construed as meritocratic by halfwit client journalists and general pondlife. City’s near total dominance on the pitch under Pep Guardiola also enhanced one of the Premier League’s implied appeals – hard work and patience is for losers, so perhaps your club will be next to receive the philanthropic effects of sportswashing.
Sportswashing. I always found the term to be insufficient. It doesn’t capture what Abu Dhabi have achieved since 2008. For a start City’s flagrant cheating belies one of sportswashing’s core aims: “the practice of using sports to improve a tarnished reputation, distract from controversy, or divert attention away from unethical or illegal activities”.
Among many, Abu Dhabi United Group’s ownership of Manchester City has never been viewed as a legitimate enterprise. The state proxy’s true goal was something far grander than encouraging wealthy Tories to holiday at The Ritz-Carlton in Abu Dhabi, enticing entrepreneurs to emigrate for the low taxes, or obscuring the lack of basic freedoms afforded to specific groups in the seven emirates. It was to make us more like them by weakening our belief in democratic norms. Those things that guide standards of private and public life; that nobody is above the law and that our tradition of political plurality – the kind they do not believe in or practise – remains robust, where fairness matters and that the masses can collectively oppose policy, forms of power or corruption.
City’s owners agreed to a set of rules, with the intention of breaking said rules, while expecting other clubs to abide by them. Not only was that unfair and deceitful, but their scheme, coupled with insufficient regulation, inculcated a sense of helplessness in the wider public and eroded confidence that everyone can be held to account. Autocrats rule by force at home, but can also utilise immense wealth to attempt to supersede accountability abroad.
But this abomination at Manchester City happened only through an existing tolerance of Abramovich’s clear stratagem – a collective willingness to undervalue that fair competition is an essential aspect of sport. I have real doubts that can ever be fully recovered through imposing penalties on Manchester City after the fact. Not after twenty plus years of normalisation.
Everyone has had their say on what the punishment for Manchester City should be – points deductions, relegation, expulsion from the football league, transfer bans, fines and restitution payments to other clubs, or retrospectively stripping Manchester City of trophies won.
A combination of the above will be rightfully levied against the club. But the only outcome that matters is creating an established deterrent, that emphatically penalises owners who believe that cheating is beneficial.
Abu Dhabi have not only shown a lack of contrition but a combative obstinacy in resisting the Premier League’s investigation, and utilised rhetoric that is conspiratorial in tone. That and the scale of their cheating makes them not fit and proper to own a football club. But what I find most distasteful is their behaviour and what it reveals – they have no respect for the competitive culture that made and makes English football what it is. Removing them is a necessary first step, and the only hope to restoring the game’s sense of self-respect and our respect for it.
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