Gulf state Abu Dhabi has given vast sums to fund Manchester City’s recent dominance, yet you’d barely have known it on a steamy evening there for the Champions League final, writes OWEN SLOT.
I drove back from what I suspect was the biggest Champions League final party in the city looking for a firework exploding in the sky, a car-horn tooting or a flag waving, and there was nothing.
The Champions League winners were forged in Manchester yet funded here in Abu Dhabi, but there was nothing here that either represented celebration – At last! We’ve been invested for 15 years, we’ve finally done it! – or that gave real clarity as to why an Emirate state had helped a football club in Manchester to lift the trophy of their dreams.
A picture taken by Owen Slot while in an Abu Dhabi shopping mall.
Abu Dhabi hasn’t turned sky blue. Indeed, when I got back to my hotel, the Emirates Palace, no one was up – and given that the Emirates Palace is one of the Manchester City sponsors, you would have thought that a celebration of some kind was in order.
Yet there was a hilarious story here. One of City’s sponsors is e& (formerly known as Etisalat), an Abu Dhabi telecoms giant and TV provider. Two weeks ago, though, e& dropped beIN Sports channels from its TV platforms. This meant that the Emirates Palace hotel couldn’t show on its TVs the broadcast of the team that it sponsors winning the trophy that it has been helping to pay for them to win – because another sponsor, e&, had prevented them from doing so.
The common interpretation is that Sheikh Mansour, the vice-president of the UAE, bought City as a soft power tool for the nation, but even if that’s what it has actually achieved, it doesn’t seem particularly thought through or joined up.
Of course, thousands of others across Abu Dhabi were similarly affected by e& dropping beIN. Yet no one really knows why beIN was dropped in the first place; e& is largely state owned and so there is no democratic right, here, to an explanation. Nor is anyone owed an explanation as to why so many Abu Dhabi businesses have started sponsoring that one, same football club in Manchester. You’ve just won the Champions League. Enjoy it.
Manchester City’s Norwegian striker Erling Haaland poses with the European Cup. Picture: Paul Ellis/AFP
And plenty of them do. At my Champions League event, there are big cheers for Sheikh Mansour every time his face appears on the big screen, and also for his elder brother, the president – yes, more applause than Kyle Walker gets, when he comes on as a substitute, and they like him too.
Yet this feels like an oasis in the desert. On arrival at Abu Dhabi international airport, you don’t see imagery of City. In the city itself, you don’t see billboards adorned with Erling Haaland or high rises with Kevin De Bruyne. Nor do you see the man on the street wearing sky blue replica City shirts.
Abu Dhabi hasn’t been City-fied. It doesn’t feel as though City are their proxy national team. That said, there was a double-page City poster in The National, the English-language newspaper, on Friday, but given that Sheikh Mansour is, ultimately, the owner of The National, that may not be such a surprise.
When you walk into the Emirates Palace hotel, you wouldn’t know that it is a City sponsor. Even on Saturday, there was nothing to suggest that a significant day had just dawned. You certainly don’t get a City chocolate on your pillow (and that’s not such a ridiculous suggestion as Cadbury is another sponsor, and you can get a City chocolate collection).
Yet this is the hotel where City stay when they are here (they had a mid-season camp here during the World Cup) and there are two football pitches kept in pristine condition for their visits. One is an indoor dome; yesterday (Sunday) it was decked out ready for a children’s birthday party.
Manchester City’s Pep Guardiola, Khaldoon Al Mubarak, Xabier Mancisidor, Rodolfo Borrell and Carles Planchart meet during a December training session in Abu Dhabi. Picture: Tom Flathers/Manchester City FC via Getty Images
On Friday I went to Masdar City, near the airport. Masdar is another City sponsor; it is an Abu Dhabi renewable energy company and Masdar City is its big project, an experiment in green building technologies and low-carbon lifestyle. There was no sign of City here either. In the shopping centre, there was a kids’ football zone, but this was run by the Soccer Kids Academy rather than City.
Nothing, either, at Aldar Square, the HQ of Aldar, Man City’s official real estate partner, though the lady at reception whips out her phone and proudly shows the selfie of her and Pep Guardiola when he was on a recent visit.
You see, it’s not as if City don’t engage. They run a number of football schools which parents are keen to get their children on; parents sing the praises of the quality of coaching and the fact that their children are taught to play out from the back, City-style.
Plus, when the squad visit, they bring their trophies (yes, there will be a lot of them next time) and display them in the big shopping centres, and people love it. Guardiola does a lot of sponsor engagement. There is promotional video of Haaland, Riyad Mahrez and Scott Carson doing a cook-off at the Emirates Palace with one of the hotel chefs. Only this week John Stones was crowned champion pilot after a flight simulator contest provided by Etihad, another sponsor.
Manchester City’s Riyad Mahrez in action during a training session in Abu Dhabi last December. Picture: Tom Flathers/Manchester City FC via Getty Images
Yes, there are a lot of companies here that are commercial partners with City and if you want to see where the thinking is joined up, this is it. City have 48 partners (or sponsors) in total and, of those, nine of them are Abu Dhabi-based.
Why have so many Abu Dhabi businesses simultaneously decided that City are the vehicle to promote their brands? The network of ownerships and influences may be an answer. Three of the nine are owned, or part-owned, by Mubadala, an Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, and Khaldoon al-Mubarak is both chairman of City and chief executive of Mubadala. Mubadala is also an investor in Nexen, the Korean tyre company which is also a City sponsor.
The chairman of First Abu Dhabi Bank, another sponsor, is another of Mansour’s brothers. The bank is owned by the Abu Dhabi Investment Council, which is the investment arm of the government – and Mansour is vice-president. In total, three of the nine sponsors have state ownership.
So while City are not officially a state-owned club, there is a lot of the state that is invested in it and that has helped City become commercially the biggest club in the world.
This also means there are a lot of avenues for finance from Abu Dhabi that has helped it get to the top – and though there is nothing necessarily wrong with that, these very avenues are of particular interest to the Premier League and its 115 charges against City for breaking Financial Fair Play rules.
Ferran Soriano, Pep Guardiola and Khaldoon Al Mubarak, chairman of Manchester City, celebrates with the Champions League trophy. Picture: Michael Steele/Getty Images
But hey, now’s not the time to rain on the parade, not when you’ve just been to Abu Dhabi’s biggest Champions League event, where you also get to meet City’s official mascots, Moonchester and Moonbeam.
The event was at the social hub of Emirati society – the shopping mall – in what they call the “town square” of the Yas Mall, near the Formula One circuit, and it was happily heaving with a very diverse crowd of some 500 people, kids in the bean bags at the front, conservative Emirati sitting in the Godiva coffee shop at the back and Abu Dhabi’s vast immigrant population in between. Lots of women in hijabs too; more women, probably, than you’d get in an English football crowd.
The most fervent Emirati are proud of their affiliation. Ali, 26, shows me the pictures of him at the City v Brighton & Hove Albion game in October; Fahad, 30, has some of him at the Wembley FA Cup final only a week ago. “Everyone knew Dubai,” Fahad says. “Now they know Abu Dhabi too. City have put us on the map.” Indeed they have, though it remains unclear exactly where.
– The Times