Every Fan Should Be Cynical About Their Club's Owners. It's Not Just Man City Who Are Acting Against Supporter Interests
Imagine thinking that your aspirations align with Abu Dhabi or the Saudi Public Investment Fund? And you shouldn't trust the Americans in the boardroom or Jim Ratcliffe, either
As a default rule, you should never trust your football club. The people that own and run it appear to want the same things as you. But they don’t.
Like you, they want to win, of course, but for different reasons. Traditionally, success has brought profit and reflected glory on to those in the boardroom. Prestige is often a bigger motivation than money.
Has Jim Ratcliffe taken over the running of Manchester United to swell his already bulging Monaco-based coffers? Nope. Now he gets to be the big-shot at Old Trafford. That is a point where fandom and business meet.
John W Henry once explained to me what it was like to be in charge of a winning sports organisation. He owns the Boston Red Sox and was at the helm when the Major League Baseball franchise broke their 86-year World Series drought.
“I’ve never been a jock,” the geekish head of Fenway Sports Group said. “I never knew what it was like to get the sort of adulation that winning athletes get.” That changed 20 years ago when Boston won baseball’s biggest prize. Henry was overwhelmed by the way Red Sox fans reacted towards him. “I felt the love of the people,” he said. It was a heady experience.
So it was no surprise to see Henry and his fellow owners on the pitch at the Wanda Metropolitano five years ago after Liverpool beat Tottenham Hotspur to win the Champions League. Liverpool have been champions of Europe six times; Madrid was the single occasion when the owners milked the post-match applause alongside the players.
Fans do get reflected glory from their team’s successes but it’s different. It’s not personal. It’s a communal, mutual joy that comes with singing the same songs as thousands of others and the sense of common purpose. An individual identity is subsumed into something bigger. We talk of the Kop, the Street End and the Stretford End as single entities. The likes of Henry and Ratcliffe have their egos swelled by the achievements of the team, feats that make them almost as recognisable as players and managers.
Supporters, by contrast, are identified as a mass. Where distinctiveness develops is from the group and not the individual.
Now we come to Manchester City. It has been 16 years since the royal family of Abu Dhabi bought the club. Sheikh Mansour does not need the money. He, presumably, cares little about the reflected glory – he has attended just two of City’s games. What is in it for him?
City are a tool to promote Abu Dhabi to the world. The leap from being a well-supported but underachieving club to one of the globe’s most powerful sporting entities has been hallmarked by a Machiavellian approach that would not be out of place in the renaissance writer’s political treatise, The Prince. That makes sense. Machiavelli wrote about cynical diplomacy. City are an instrument of the emirate’s foreign policy.
And, guess what? They’ve gone to war. With the Premier League, who have already charged the club with 115 financial transgressions. Now, though, City are on the offensive.
The team that has generated an unprecedented period of domestic domination in the past seven years are claiming that the Premier League’s financial rules regarding sponsorship are holding them back. The fiscal restrictions, which needed to be passed by 14 of the 20 top flight clubs, are being characterised by City as a “tyranny of the majority” and legal action is under way.
City’s owners know about tyranny. The Abu Dhabi Judicial Department conducted a social media campaign that said: “Your freedom stops at the boundaries of law.”
The problem is that Abu Dhabi is the capital of the United Arab Emirates, whose law imposes a minimum 15-year sentence for anyone who “damages the reputation or prestige of the President.”
Guess who the president is? It’s Mansour’s brother!
More alarmingly, Amnesty International says in its 2023 report that “Authorities continued to unduly restrict the rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly… Authorities continued to arbitrarily detain 26 prisoners of conscience, and denied or severely restricted some prisoners’ communication with their families. Authorities launched a new mass trial of over 80 Emiratis.”
Ratcliffe wants to lord it over Old Trafford. Henry wants the musky aphrodisiac of the superstar to rub off on him. Mansour wants the world to focus on silverware rather than human rights.
Yet a certain section of City fans are queuing up to defend not only the club but the owners. They’ve been joined by Newcastle United supporters, some of whom have developed a slavish affection for their Saudi overlords. One crank on social media wrote: “11 American owners in the PL. All getting twitchy because there are 2 Middle East owners. Discrimination. Undoubtedly.” That was from a Newcastle fan.
You have to have sympathy for City – and Newcastle – fans. They had no say in who bought their club. Supporters were there before Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia arrived, in the same way Liverpool and United followers predate their American owners.
But too many people appear to believe that you have to support the owners as well as the club. You don’t. They are not like you. They have different aspirations and almost nothing in common with the men and women in the stands. This is particularly true at the Etihad.
City supporters crowing about destroying the Premier League cannot have processed the implications of this action. The argument is quite simple. Abu Dhabi wants carte blanche to pump as much money as it wants into City regardless of the damage it will do to other clubs and competition. City had a vote in setting the rules but the majority of Premier League teams – more than two-thirds – opted to set different standards. How can City fans defend going to law? Even self-interest does not apply. This is only in Abu Dhabi’s interests.
That’s because this development edges us nearer to a Super League. It would suit Mansour to be playing Real Madrid more often and never facing Crystal Palace or Fulham.
All supporters should take a cynical attitude towards their club’s ownership. Those in the boardroom rarely have your best interests at heart. They only have their own. If yours coincides with theirs, you’re lucky. But remember, it won’t last forever.