KopTalk.com Forums Football Liverpool FC Forum Manchester City Exposed - Bending the Rules!!!

Ok so we've heard little bits, but not truly a concise breakdown of just exactly what Manchester City are accused of...and it's "DAMNING"!

Now City's "ONLY" defence here can be the fact that their emails were hacked, but it cannot disguise the fact the amount of cheating they've been up to in order to go from a bang average Championship Club to the most elite club in the top tier of English Football.

By DER SPIEGEL Staff

Manchester City Exposed

Chapter 1: Bending the Rules to the Tune of Millions

For years now, the Manchester City football club has vehemently denied that its owner, the sheikh of Abu Dhabi, broke financial rules. But internal emails tell a different story, providing evidence of backdated contracts, illusory sponsoring payments and cavalier, "We can do what we want," business practices.

Even as far back as 1880, when Anna Connell, the daughter of a vicar, founded a football club in Manchester to keep the unemployed and common laborers away from alcohol, the Al Nahyan family ruled Abu Dhabi. The clan of camel herders and pearl fishers lived in mudbrick homes beneath palm fronds -- and one can assume that for several ensuing decades, the idea of sky blue-clad football players was just as foreign to them as desert heat was to the Mancunians. But 128 years later, in September 2008, England's "Capital of the North" and the Al Nahyans, who had become a multibillion-dollar oil dynasty in the ensuing years, found their way to each other. And the consequences have been dramatic.

The once-mediocre club from East Manchester is currently the best team in the Premier League, a glitzy product that has become a fantastic advertisement for Abu Dhabi. Refined strategists like Kevin De Bruyne and Ilkay Gündogan play for the team, along with the electric Leroy Sané, all under the leadership of perhaps the best trainer in the world, Pep Guardiola. It's a one-of-a-kind success story.

Now, though, documents made available by the whistleblower platform Football Leaks expose the dirty tricks behind the team's success.

The club owners from Abu Dhabi have introduced a new era of Manchester Capitalism. The term originally refers to that period of the industrial revolution when companies were ruthless and accepted no regulations whatsoever. But it can also be applied to the world of football: Since its purchase by the sheikh of Abu Dhabi, Manchester City has managed to cheat its way into the top echelon of European football and create a global, immensely profitable football empire, ignoring rules along the way. The club's newfound glory is rooted in lies.

The true story of City's climb is one of political influence and economic callousness. And it affects everyone who wants to understand the business of modern-day football.

The Cheating Sheikh:

"Aguueeerrooooooo!" A name, a drawn-out shriek. An icon. Every Manchester City fan is intimately familiar with this scream, blurted out by announcer Martin Tyler on May 13, 2012. Every "Cityzen" knows where they were at that precise moment, 93 minutes and 20 seconds after the match had begun, during the final seconds of the game, the final seconds of the season. Man City needed a victory to win the Premier League for the first time in 44 years.

But their opponent, the relegation-candidate Queens Park Rangers, had taken the lead. It looked as though the season would end as so many had before, with Manchester City's crosstown rivals Manchester United once again winning the championship. Then Edin Dzeko headed in the ball after 91 minutes and 14 seconds, tying the match. Just two minutes later, Aguueeerrooooooo hammered the ball into the back of the net, delivering his team the championship.

Those 126 seconds of injury time are part of the club's emotional founding myth, a team owned by sheikhs from Abu Dhabi that was to no longer treat championships as the electrifying exception, but as a satisfyingly regular occurrence. For Man City fans, the championship was a football miracle, but for the club's critics, it was merely a matter of time. Those detractors have long felt that Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan's investment in the club, and the transfer-sum records that he has since pulverized, represents a distortion of the principles of competition. A state made rich by oil stands behind the team, they say, adding that its sponsoring contracts are nothing but a surreptitious path for Abu Dhabi money to flow into the club. Manchester City executives have consistently rejected such claims.

Man City plays in Etihad Stadium and the team's jerseys are likewise sponsored by Etihad. The Abu Dhabi airline is led by Mansour's half-brother. The Abu Dhabi telecommunications company Etisalat and the Abu Dhabi tourism authority also advertise with the club. So too does the Abu Dhabi investment firm Aabar, which owns stakes in UniCredit and Virgin Galactic.

English football has never seen investments of this size. And the true numbers in an internal analysis compiled by club leadership are explosive. They come from a document titled "Summary of Owner Investment" dated May 10, 2012, three days before Sergio Agüero's decisive goal. By this time, the management installed by Mansour had been with the club for just three years and eight months -- and they calculated that the owner from Abu Dhabi had already invested 1.1 billion pounds, around 1.3 billion euros, in the club. One section of the document is particularly consequential. It bears the heading: "Supplement to Abu Dhabi partnership deals."


"Supplement to Abu Dhabi partnership deals": This internal document lists how much money the club owner had invested in City in the period up to May 2012.

To explain what that is, we have to return to "Aguueeerrooooooo," to the team's rebirth. In the stands, grown men shed tears, while the players on the field piled into a sky-blue heap. On the sideline, a 47-year-old man in a suit cheered along with them, later draping an Italian flag across his shoulders: trainer Roberto Mancini, who had won the Italian league championship three times, the Italian league cup four times and introduced four new multimillion-pound acquisitions into Manchester City's team at the start of the championship season. One of them was Agüero.

Mancini had brought City its first title in almost half a century. But he would soon fall victim to his boss' ambition: Just one year later, Mancini was fired because the team proved unable to defend its title. That, apparently, is the logic adhered to by the owner: If it doesn't work, it must be replaced. But there was also a new problem: the recently introduced Financial Fair Play (FFP) rules established by UEFA, a set of budgetary statutes that came into force just a few weeks after Mancini was shown the door. First and foremost, the European football association wanted to ensure clubs didn't take on too much debt and slide into bankruptcy. Secondly, UEFA was concerned about competition in the European football leagues. They wanted to forbid clubs from spending more than they brought in.

City, though, was in danger of violating exactly that stipulation. "We will have a shortfall of 9.9m pounds in order to comply with UEFA FFP this season," Man City's Chief Financial Officer Jorge Chumillas wrote in an internal email. "The deficit is due to RM (eds: a reference to Roberto Mancini) termination. I think that the only solution left would be an additional amount of AD (eds: Abu Dhabi) sponsorship revenues that covers this gap."

In that email, Chumillas essentially revealed that his club does business a bit differently than regular football clubs. Normally, the business of football looks like this: The players play successful football, attract a growing audience, the team's games are televised, and potential sponsors take an interest. These sponsors sign contracts with the team obligating them to pay a fixed amount for the privilege of advertising with the club. This money becomes part of the team's budget for the season and can be used to sign players, pay agent fees or maintain the grass on the pitch. When the team's planning is off, or it suddenly has to spend more than called for in the business plan, the club shows a loss at the end of the season and has to cut Costs.

But Manchester City is no normal club. Costs and debt? None of that matters. And should a shortfall emerge, sponsors from the owner's home country simply send more money over. Penalties are only for those who get caught. To dodge UEFA sanctions, Man City management came up with a few creative proposals. "We could do a backdated deal for the next two years (...) paid up front," suggested club executive Simon Pearce. CEO Ferran Soriano, meanwhile, suggested having sponsors pay the team the contractually obligated bonus for winning the FA cup -- even though Man City hadn't won.

Ten days after the end of the season, Chumillas presented the results of the deliberations and declared that the details of the sponsoring contracts would be adjusted -- for the just finished season! Etihad was to suddenly pay 1.5 million pounds more, Aabar 0.5 million extra and the tourism authority a surplus of fully 5.5 million pounds. And they were all supposed to act as though that had been the deal agreed to at the beginning of the season.

The club and its sponsors were manipulating their contracts. When Chumillas asked his colleague Simon Pearce if they could change the date of payment for the sponsors from Abu Dhabi, Pearce answered in the spirit of Manchester City's executives: "Of course, we can do what we want."

These activities in spring 2013 raise doubts as to whether the Abu Dhabi-based companies are really the independent sponsors Man City representatives have consistently claimed them to be. As early as April 2010, when Pearce negotiated the sponsorship deal with Aabar, he wrote a telltale email to the firm's leadership. According to the contract, the investment company was to pay the club 15 million pounds annually. But that apparently isn't the full story. "As we discussed, the annual direct obligation for Aabar is GBP 3 million," Pearce wrote. "The remaining 12 million GBP requirement will come from alternative sources provided by His Highness." With just a single sentence, Pearce confirmed the accusations that his club had repeatedly, indignantly rejected: Namely, that His Highness, Sheikh Mansour, paid a portion of the sponsoring money himself!

That is of vital importance when it comes to UEFA's Financial Fair Play rules. If the club goes on a shopping spree with the sheikh's money, those expenditures must be declared, which quickly puts the balance sheet in the red. If, however, that money can be disguised as sponsoring money, it looks like revenues and Man City can afford larger expenditures without fear of UEFA sanctions.

Manchester City financial reports were a web of lies; the team walked all over the Financial Fair Play rules. Etihad Airways, one of the world's largest airlines, also plays along. "Etihad's direct contribution remains constant at 8m," wrote Simon Pearce in December 2013. At that time, Etihad's contractual sponsoring obligation was 35 million Pounds.

How does it work in practice? Apparently, companies like Etihad in Abu Dhabi wait for the Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG), the holding company that belongs to Sheikh Mansour and which also owns Manchester City, to wire them money. That money is then "routed through the partners and they then forward onto us," wrote Finance Director Andrew Widdowson in an email. That, at least, is how things were done in 2015: At the time, the deal with Etihad was bringing in 67.5 million pounds annually. But Chief Financial Officer Chumillas emphasized in an email to Pearce: "Please note that out of those 67.5m pounds, 8m pounds should be funded directly by Etihad and 59.5 by ADUG."

When contacted for a response, Etihad said the financial obligations associated with the partnership with the club have always been and remain the airline's "sole liability and responsibility." The airline says it is proud it has been City's main sponsor since May 2009. Aabar and the Abu Dhabi tourism authority did not respond to the specifics of questions submitted by EIC journalists.

It is these "supplements to Abu Dhabi partnership deals," paid for by the sheikh and his "alternative sources," that are openly designed and discussed internally, but vehemently and aggressively denied in public. This is exactly what Bayern Munich President Uli Hoeness means when he complains that Abu Dhabi only has to open up the oil spigots to be able to afford expensive players. "There is almost a personification of the club with the values we hold as Abu Dhabi, as Sheikh Mansour," Khaldoon Al Mubarak said at one point after acquiring the club. Cheat until they notice?

The EIC research network asked Manchester City for a comment. The club stated that they would not respond to the questions. "The attempt to damage the Club's reputation is organized and clear", a spokesperson wrote.

By the time Martin Tyler screamed "Aguueeerrooooooo!" into the microphone in May 2012, internal City calculations noted that 127.5 million pounds had already been pumped in as supplements to Abu Dhabi partnership deals. That is a competitive advantage that no club in the world can keep up with, except perhaps one -- Paris Saint-German, which is bankrolled by gas-rich Qatar.

Both PSG and Manchester City negotiated settlements with UEFA in 2014 to avoid possible exclusion from the Champions League due to rules violations. Such settlements should really be intended to sanction the clubs for their cavalier business practices and the grotesquely inflated sums flowing in from state-controlled sponsors. But that went awry on two counts. For one, UEFA ultimately succumbed to the threats issued by the two teams' Gulf state owners and signed weak settlements. For another, the football association wasn't even entirely aware of the degree to which it had been deceived. It could not have known, for example, that Manchester City had set up a secret project aimed at hiding costs.

It is a remarkable story involving discrete, multimillion-pound donors to the British governing party, an Icelandic bank that went bust during the financial crisis and club executives' fears that Manchester City could ultimately come to be seen as the "global enemies of football."

https://www.spiegel.de/international/man...-a-1236346.html

Manchester City Exposed

Chapter 2: The Secret 'Project Longbow'

A phony, multimillion-pound deal and behind-the-scenes lobbying: Before the introduction of the new Financial Fair Play rules, Manchester City did all it could to dodge spending regulations. The club insisted to UEFA it was innocent.

The path to football immortality got off to a rough start this year, on a cold, wet, East Manchester evening in September. The Man City stadium wasn't sold out and many of the VIP boxes were empty, rather surprising given that it was the team's first Champions League group match, pitting the club against Olympique Lyon. It ended in frustration, and with a surprise loss, the French team emerging with a 2:1 victory. City fans began heading for the exits in the 80th minute.

Last season, star trainer Pep Guardiola and his team had shattered numerous Premier League records. Never before had a team scored as many goals, collected as many points or won as many matches. But in the Champions League last spring, Pep's team was booted out of the tournament in the quarterfinals by FC Liverpool. In fact, City has never made it to the Champions League final; it is the last title the club must win to take its place in the pantheon of football excellence. Guardiola's contract even includes a bonus of 2 million pounds should he succeed.

That yearning for recognition -- and for the ample prize money that comes along with it -- is all tied to this accursed tournament put on by UEFA. But Manchester isn't particularly fond of UEFA. For years, the team's fans, otherwise a rather quiet lot, have passionately booed their hearts out when the Champions League hymn is played. City fans feel that they and their team have been victimized by UEFA. In particular, the penalty the team was forced to pay in 2014 due to its violations of UEFA's Financial Fair Play (FFP) rules was seen by fans as unfair.

Yet documents from the whistleblower platform Football Leaks reveal that UEFA actually showed Manchester City far too much lenience. The European football association was aware that it let City off the hook with a ludicrously low penalty, despite the club's far-reaching deception. What UEFA didn't know, however, was the vast extent of Manchester's deceit -- mendacity that began the moment in 2008 when Sheikh Mansour purchased the club.

When the new club bosses from Abu Dhabi bought the team in 2008, Man City was in poor shape. It hadn't won a Premier League title in 40 years and constantly had to play second-fiddle to its crosstown rivals, Manchester United. But they began implementing their strategy immediately: Pumping as much money into the club until it could compete, or rather, until it could impose its will on the competition. In the first two years after the ownership change, Manchester City spent over 300 million euros on new players. Sheikh Mansour's managers began catapulting the team to an altogether different class starting with the very first player transfers.

But there was a problem: UEFA's FFP rules, which prohibited clubs from spending more money than they brought in. In the worst case, teams that violated FFP provisions could be prohibited from taking part in European competitions, including the Champions League. UEFA President Michel Platini was adamant: "If a club does not keep to the rules, we will make no concessions."

No wonder Man City executives were unsettled. Their entire strategy depended on cash injections from a man who owns a 500-million-euro yacht with two helipads and who possesses one of the fastest and most expensive cars in the world, the Bugatti Veyron. And he has five of them. According to confidential club calculations, he pumped around 1.1 billion pounds into the team in just the first four years he owned Man City.

Club executives realized as early as January 2010 that the new FFP rules, which were to go into effect in 2013, would torpedo their business plan. After all, they planned to continue hemorrhaging money in the coming years. One potential response to the FFP rules would have been quite simple: City could have established new sources of revenue that were not linked to the sheikh, cut costs and lowered the expectations many had for the football project. But no: If you want to buy your way into football heaven, you can't let a few rules get in the way.

In the summer of 2010, Man City spent over 140 million euros on new players, with an additional 90 million invested the next year. Before the team's sale to the new owner from Abu Dhabi, players such as Martin Petrov, Rolando Bianchi and Georgios Samaras were on the City roster, but they soon had to make way for names like Sergio Agüero, Mario Balotelli and Carlos Tévez. In 2012, one year before the FFP rules went into effect, Man City's bookkeepers sounded the alarm. "Without significant additional revenues (...), UEFA FFP compliance WILL NOT be achieved," noted an internal presentation. Avenues to avoid non-compliance "need to be pursued aggressively."

Club leadership began searching for allies in their attempt to avert the approaching disaster. Manchester City CEO Ferran Soriano reported back to other club executives about a meeting of the European Club Association (ECA), a group representing the interests of professional teams in Europe. And he could hardly hide his disdain for those who supported the FFP rules. "They are all pushing for FFP in a way that would ashame (sic) any industry association."

He said some clubs were secretly opposed to FFP, but that they were afraid to say so openly. Which made things more difficult. "We will need to fight this," Soriano wrote in his memo, "and do it in a way that is not visible, or we will be pointed out as the global enemies of football."

Behind closed doors, they began looking for "creative solutions" to circumvent the rules, resulting in the launch of a secret project with the rather military-esque name "Project Longbow." In explaining the name, the club's chief legal adviser, Simon Cliff, noted in an internal email that the longbow was "the weapon the English used to beat the French at Crecy and Agincourt." For Man City club leadership, the enemy was apparently Michel Platini, the French UEFA president, and his signature project, FFP.

Among club employees, Project Longbow would become synonymous over the next several years with the battle against Financial Fair Play. Under Soriano's leadership, Man City established "a central model" that "allows for many of the operational costs to be shifted either fully or partially away from the club."

It is a telling window into the team's approach: High costs and losses are fine as long as they can be hidden from UEFA. To help do so, Manchester City established a subsidiary to take care of a share -- and the costs -- of some standard business activities.

For example, the club transferred the marketing rights for its players to an external company. Normally, professional teams have to pay their athletes for the right to use them in club marketing material. But City drummed up buyers for those marketing rights -- an ingenious plan. Suddenly, the club no longer had to pay the marketing fees -- the new buyers did, resulting in spending cuts for Man City. Furthermore, the sale of the marketing rights generated additional revenues for the club to present to UEFA investigators: almost 30 million euros in this case. The marketing company adopted the name Fordham Sports Management and it is "very material for our longbow target," City's chief financial officer, Jorge Chumillas, noted internally.

The deal was too good to be true. The club had brought on board two experts to construct the castle of lies: Jonathan Rowland and his father David. The senior Rowland, a well-connected investment specialist, had been in the news in previous years as a result of the millions of pounds he had donated to the Conservative Party before then being appointed party treasurer. He never actually took up the post, however, withdrawing after it came out that he had hardly paid any taxes in the UK over decades. Rowland is still considered today to be a close ally of the crown prince of Abu Dhabi.

David Rowland and his son Jonathan together took over what was left of Kaupthing Bank in Iceland after its collapse during the financial crisis. The result was Banque Havilland, and a list of its branches reads like a travel guide for investors looking to avoid pesky questions and tax obligations: Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, the Bahamas, Switzerland. The owners of Fordham, the company that bought the marketing rights to Manchester City players, are likewise well-hidden: The path first leads to a British straw-man company, then to the British Virgin Islands and finally to the Rowland family trust.


"Funding of Losses": An internal document from City's management shows that a company ("3rd Party") is to buy the image rights of City players. The football club's holding company, ADUG, is then to reimburse this company for its costs.

Why so secretive?

Internal Manchester City documents shed light on the true nature of the deal. A concept paper shows that Fordham Sports Management is merely one element in a closed payment loop: Sheikh Mansour's holding company, Abu Dhabi United Group, transferred money to the Rowlands for the purchase of the marketing rights and to pay Man City's players for their marketing appearances. The money transfers were coordinated by Manchester City itself. Fordham, in other words, was merely a vehicle for hidden capital injections from Abu Dhabi.

Jonathan Rowland wanted additional confirmation of that. "We need to know that AD is fully behind it this is the most important thing," he wrote on April 4, 2013, to Simon Pearce, a club executive and adviser to the Abu Dhabi ruling family. In response, Pearce sought to put Rowland's mind at ease and let him in on the plan: "Regarding the ongoing operating costs, every year we will send in advance the cash of approximately 11 million." The "we" in this case is the holding company that Sheikh Mansour had used to buy Manchester City: Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG). "I have ended up as the de facto MD (managing director) for ADUG," Pearce joked in one email to colleagues.


Berylstone Limited: Fordham's corporate structure leads to the Rowlands' family trust according to internal City documents.

It was a farce: A club director was controlling the expenditures of the club owner's holding company, money that would travel around the world before landing in the team's coffers. His boss, Man City Chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak from Abu Dhabi, with tight links to the ruling family, gave his blessing to the payments.

Neither David nor Jonathan Rowland commented on the Fordham deal when contacted by journalists with European Investigative Collaborations network.

In the first year that the new FFP rules were in effect, UEFA's Investigatory Chamber examined Manchester City's numbers. Once auditors had pored over documents filed by the club, UEFA found that Man City was in violation of Financial Fair Play. The club responded with indignance and threatened to sue UEFA, the auditors and others involved in the finding. Ultimately, the team managed to hammer out a deal with UEFA General Secretary Gianni Infantino that achieved one primary goal: avoiding anything that might hurt Manchester City.

But the negotiations between UEFA and City didn't address Fordham at all. Rather, the focus was on the value of the team's sponsoring contracts and other company entities that had been outsourced. In other words, the team's violation of the Financial Fair Play rules was far more egregious than thought.

It was only the next year that auditors from PricewaterhouseCoopers took a closer look at Fordham on behalf of UEFA. "This was a very good deal for MCFC," a PwC analyst, using the abbreviation for Manchester City Football Club, noted in a conference call with team executives. He added that he was having trouble figuring out "how Fordham expected to make a return." The response from club lawyer Simon Cliff was the pinnacle of cynicism. He didn't know, he said, because Fordham hadn't shown Manchester City its business plan. At a different point, one of Cliff's co-workers claimed that City had made the deal with Fordham because "the price was right." Of course, it was: The club had determined the price itself.

The EIC network also contacted Manchester City for comment. Officials at the club said they would not respond to the questions. "The attempt to damage the Club's reputation is organized and clear," a spokesperson wrote.

The Fordham episode reveals how club owners circumvented the rules imposed by UEFA. And that Manchester City's management follows the dubious logic of the superrich. Indeed, it goes so far that City employees have sought to impede human rights organizations and control the press.

Chapter 3: Recruiting Pep Guardiola

The powerful men behind Manchester City don't just show up in the stadium, they also make appearances on the global political stage. Control is their top priority. They managed to lure star trainer Pep Guardiola away from FC Bayern almost a year before he took over Man City.

Pep Guardiola never seems to stand still -- and doesn't always seem to have himself under full control. On the sidelines, he paces, screams instructions at his players, cheers wildly and bubbles over with excitement. But when he meets Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, he's like a different person. In the glitzy documentary "All or Nothing," for which the filmmakers accompanied Manchester City for a full year, Guardiola is well-mannered, almost sheepish, as he makes forced small-talk with the club's billionaire owner. Viewers can't really understand what the two are saying, but the main thing is that they both are smiling and laughing.

"All or Nothing," an Amazon documentary, presents the team trip to Abu Dhabi like a marketing video that could have been produced by the country's own tourism authority, showing friendly players wearing the team's sky-blue jerseys, the typically British characters working in the Man City laundry, and the ever-sartorially skilled Khaldoon Al Mubarak, the team's chairman. The sheikh's right-hand man can be seen smiling gently and confidently, cutting a good figure next to former Oasis guitarist Noel Gallagher, a passionate Man City fan.

The chairman is, as the British would say, soft spoken -- and it becomes clear from posts on social media that the team's fans love him. "What a blessing our chairman is," reads one such post, "the best chairman in the world, so smart, so humble." And: "City fans are lucky to have him."

But what does this man really stand for? How important is he for Abu Dhabi, the emirate that only half-heartedly tries to hide its true role in Manchester City's transformation into a European powerhouse? How does team management, allegedly at the behest of Sheikh Mansour, run the Premier League club?

Documents from the whistleblower platform Football Leaks provide a peak behind the curtain at the team's internal operations. Unlike "All or Nothing," the resulting image is unembellished.

In August 2010, two years after he bought the team, Sheikh Mansour attended a Manchester City game for the first time. The oil billionaire grinned and waved at the crowd while the underlings next to him in the VIP box looked on, the tension clearly visible on their faces. Even Mubarak seemed nervous. But the team delivered, defeating Liverpool 3:0, and the visit ended in success. It still remains the only time Mansour has attended a game in over 10 years of ownership.

It is an open secret that the sheikh doesn't meddle in the management of his investment. Khaldoon Al Mubarak can also be forgiven for not having time to take too close an interest in day-to-day team tactics or financial details. After all, "His Excellence," as he is commonly referred to, is also head of a company called Mubadala and of the Executive Affairs Authority (EAA) back in Abu Dhabi. Those two jobs could also help explain the investment in Manchester City: Mubadala is a state-owned investment company, responsible for investing the emirate's oil billions around the world. The EAA, meanwhile, is an arm of the government, directing Abu Dhabi's international strategy.

Manchester City is "the soft-power strategy of the ruling family," says Christopher Davidson, a professor of Middle East politics at Durham University. He sees the sheikh's investment in Manchester City as the product of political calculation: The ruling family, he believes, views English football as a vehicle for marketing Abu Dhabi and improving relations between the emirate and the West.

But what about the official claim that City is merely the hobby investment of a passionate football fan?

Davidson points to the club chairman. "Khaldoon Al Mubarak is the de facto prime minister of Abu Dhabi," he says. Why, then, should he be responsible for managing Sheikh Mansour's hobby, particularly given that Mansour is below Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, MbZ for short, in Abu Dhabi's hierarchy? "The responsible people at Man City are primarily the crown prince's men rather than Sheikh Mansour's," says Davidson. In addition to being crown prince in Abu Dhabi, MbZ commands the armed forces of United Arab Emirates.

n the war in Yemen, UAE troops are fighting against Houthi militias and the Muslim Brotherhood and in 2017, the Associated Press published a detailed story about secret prisons run by UAE where torture is commonplace. UAE has denied the accusations.

"Under MbZ's rule, the UAE has become a brutal, torturing police state at home and a perpetrator of war crimes abroad" says Nicholas McGeehan, a native of Scotland who worked for Human Rights Watch for years and has been a consistent critic of the Manchester City owners. "The situation in the UAE is appalling." He says there isn't a single human rights activist in the country any more. "I remember asking colleagues at Human Rights Watch if there is any other country with that situation, with nobody in the country who you could talk to," McGeehan says. "And they said: North Korea and Turkmenistan." Those who dare to say anything negative about the ruling family are arrested.

Abu Dhabi isn't the only Gulf state to have discovered football in recent years. Its rival Qatar, for example, is hosting the next World Cup and has also spent almost 2 billion euros on boosting Paris Saint-Germain to the pinnacle of European football. But the wealth of Abu Dhabi, the largest of the emirates, has meant rapidly rising influence in the past decades. And Crown Prince MbZ is also allied with the crown prince in Saudi Arabia, who is currently facing accusations he ordered the murder of a critical Saudi journalist in Turkey.

One of MbZ's PR men is Simon Pearce, an Australian who is part of City leadership and the most important link between Abu Dhabi and Manchester. He is virtually unknown to the public, but internally, he is viewed with a combination of fear and respect. He also works for Mubarak's Executive Affairs Authority (EAA) in Abu Dhabi.

From there, he issues instructions to his colleagues in Manchester and informs them both of the ruling family's desires and of negotiations with the team's Arab sponsors. When Man City makes a fake deal with a supposed marketing rights agency, Pearce takes care of the details on the emirate's side. Pearce, after all, has to get permission from Khaldoon Al Mubarak before making multimillion-euro transfers. And usually a brief email from his chairman is enough: "OK, go ahead."

Before joining the world of football, Pearce worked for Burson-Marsteller, a PR agency specialized in discrete problem-solving and image control for extremely influential clients. For years, a sarcastic slogan for the company has been making the rounds: "When evil needs public relations, evil has Burson-Marsteller on speed dial."

Pearce is an image consultant who carefully weighs risks against how they might be perceived externally, a man who leaves nothing to chance. As such, he is deeply allergic to critical questions from human rights organizations.

In August 2013, Nicholas McGeehan from Human Rights Watch filed a request for information on the basis of the UK's Freedom of Information Act, a law which allows citizens the right to review official documents. Such requests must be honored within a specific time limit.

McGeehan was interested in examining a contract between the city of Manchester and the Man City football club pertaining to the site where the team had built Etihad Campus, a sporting and stadium complex not far from the city center. Pearce wrote to other team executives that he had taken a close look at the document in question and saw little risk that it would provide the human rights organization with cause for criticism. There was no way to prevent the document from being released, he continued, but there was no hurry either. "He should get it on the morning of the final day Sept. 1st," he wrote, a date that was still two weeks away at the time of his email. "I want to disrupt any momentum."

When contacted by journalists with the EIC network for comment, officials at the club said they would not respond to the questions. "The attempt to damage the Club's reputation is organized and clear," a spokesperson wrote.

Away from the public limelight, Man City executives have shown themselves to be fond of flexing their muscles. Their confidential operations receive code names, while conflicts with football associations are conducted through discrete diplomacy or by applying internal pressure.

The hiring of Pep Guardiola was also a secret mission. Arguably the best trainer in the world, he was the badly needed, final building block in Abu Dhabi's prestige project, which was to be a model of both entrepreneurial excellence and sporting success.

The contract Guardiola signed with Manchester bears the date Oct. 10, 2015. The salary and bonus payments it guarantees are world class: In his first season, he was to earn 13.5 million pounds, a sum that would rise to 16.75 million one year later. But it's the timing that makes the signing of the contract so unusual: It happened when he was just two months into a new season at the helm of Bayern Munich. Both Manchester and the trainer said nothing publicly about the contract.

Several weeks later, however, a journalist from the Sunday Mirror wrote that Man City's director of football, Txiki Begiristain had met with Guardiola in Barcelona and speculated that a deal was in the making between Pep and City. It was, of course, inaccurate: The deal had already been signed. "I'll call him and tell him we want it removed," team spokesman Simon Heggie wrote to team officials. Later, he wrote another message informing them that the article had been taken offline. "I'll send a note around to other media to tell them to ignore it." It allowed the team to control the announcement of their new trainer -- an announcement that didn't take place until over a month later.

Control is everything, and Man City officials are fully aware that their team and their Arab owners are viewed with skepticism. But with success on the pitch and through professional PR work, they have managed to control the narrative in Britain. Many in the UK, a country which celebrates itself as the origin of modern-day rule of law and democracy, have nothing but good things to say about top UAE officials, who oversee a country where the death penalty is imposed for adultery and couples can be sent to prison for kissing in public.

To make sure it stays that way, the communications professionals in Manchester examine the potential risks of each step they take -- such as the selection of sponsors, and the question of how far is too far when it comes to making money.

In early 2014, team executives were discussing a potential deal with the Dubai-based construction company Arabtec. At the time, the firm was led by Hasan Ismaik, the controversial owner of the football team 1860 München, Munich's second team. Manchester ordered the compilation of a risk report for the possible deal. It noted that the Guardian, only a short time before, had written about the dire conditions in Abu Dhabi for migrant workers.

"Arabtec is implicated in this story," the risk analysis noted. Furthermore, Arabtec workers had gone on strike in May 2013, "which resulted in violence and deportations." And in 2009, the BBC had revealed how poorly Arabtec treated its employees. Indeed, the treatment of laborers from abroad has become a constant problem for the newly rich desert states. Abu Dhabi relies heavily on workers from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, who have built vast numbers of skyscrapers in the desert sands in the last 40 years.

The conclusion of the risk report was clear: "The partnership with Arabtec does have significant potential to damage the perception and standing of the Club and its owners." Such a deal, the report noted, could result in problems with fans, negative responses from other sponsors or criticism from human rights activists.

Vicky Kloss, a spokeswoman for City, sent an email to team executives warning them to avoid a sponsorship deal with Arabtec. "I think it's the biggest single risk to (our) reputation we have faced since 2008," she wrote. "The gap between what we (MCFC/City) do and what they (Arabtec) do is unbridgeable." She also reminded executives of Nicholas McGeehan of Human Rights watch. A deal with Arabtec, she wrote, "would be like winning the jackpot for him."

City leadership, however, overrode such concerns and decided to take Arabtec's money: 7 million pounds per year. But team executives only signed a regional advertising contract with the construction firm. The connection between Manchester City and Arabtec would only be publicized in Arab states, Russia and Turkey -- countries in which democratic values and human rights are not necessarily at the top of the priority list.

In May 2014, Ferran Soriano, Hasan Ismaik and Khaldoon Al Mubarak held a sky-blue Manchester jersey with "Arabtec" printed on it up to the camera and announced the multimillion-pound deal. Their press release sounded friendly and harmonious: glitz made in Abu Dhabi, carefully controlled by PR experts.

The Arabian company did not respond to questions submitted by journalists with the EIC network.

The work of the business professionals wasn't just limited to Manchester. In the last several years, Abu Dhabi has set up a branch office of its City franchise on almost every continent. Part 4 in this series will elucidate the strategy behind this global football empire and how the sister clubs are used for hidden payments and tax savings.

Chapter 4: A Global Empire

It's football capitalism in its purest form: Manchester City pays exorbitant salaries and turns a profit, while the City Football Group controls affiliates on all continents. Executives even used an Arab club for secret payments to the man who is now the coach of Italy's national team.

On a Saturday in October 2018, Manchester City had a match against Burnley F.C., a rather harmless team from a smallish city in northern England. It was a match in which losing was not an option and could hardly be seen as an indicator as to whether Man City was on its way to another Premier League championship. But in the 58th minute, relieved applause broke out in Etihad Stadium, even though the home team was already leading 3:0. Kevin De Bruyne had taken the field following a two-month injury layoff.

His trainer Pep Guardiola calls the Belgian player "one of the best players I've ever seen in my life." De Bruyne, he says, can do "absolutely everything." Back in February, as Manchester was continuing its record-breaking domination of the Premier League, the Sun wrote that without his goals and assists, City would have had 20 fewer points.

De Bruyne is a team leader who takes over games. In 2015, he helped VfL Wolfsburg win the league cup in Germany. After that, the team could no longer hide him from top European clubs. For months, transfer rumors surrounding the star midfielder dominated football news. And as documents from the Football Leaks trove show, Manchester City was willing to do whatever it took to get him.

"Excellent start of the season, the team is in good shape," wrote team CEO Ferran Soriano in August 2015 to fellow Man City executives. The club had started the season with three victories and already boasted a goal differential of 8:0.

But Soriano still wasn't satisfied. "We will still invest 50m more to improve it," he wrote. But he noted that he was having trouble striking a deal with Wolfsburg, a team intricately linked with VW, which is headquartered in the city. "They still do not want to sell at 50m," he wrote. "We are putting lots of pressure and hope we will get it done ... against their will. Wolfsburg (Volkswagen) say they do not want the money!"

When City decides it wants a player no matter how high the price, even an automobile manufacturer with sales of 200 billion euros eventually buckles. Ultimately, Wolfsburg received a transfer fee of 75 million -- and absent De Bruyne, plummeted in the standings. The Belgian star has been plying his trade in Manchester since September 2015.

Success at any price: There is no better description for the strategy pursued by Man City executives. Bayern Munich, Germany's wealthiest team, was apparently unable to make a better offer to De Bruyne, nor were they able to secure the services of German national team player Leroy Sané. When the native of Essen, Germany moved to Manchester a year after De Bruyne, the team made him a promise: If Sané earned less than 24.5 million pounds in his first three years with the club, City would wire him the difference. In other words, Sané -- a 20-year-old at the time -- was guaranteed a salary of the equivalent of 28 million euros for three seasons. Germany's top league doesn't stand a chance.

Manchester City benefited from the fact that club executives were able to increase and back-date sponsoring contracts with companies from Abu Dhabi at will. And that they systematically flouted UEFA's Financial Fair Play rules without any real penalty. Behind the club is the authoritarian ruling family from the United Arab Emirates, which uses its football investment as an international calling card to lend it more weight on the international stage.

But the emirate is not solely to blame for the deep divide between the haves and the have-nots in the world of football. The amount of money the Premier League now generates from the sale of broadcast rights has completely changed the football landscape in Europe. Last year, the league sent the equivalent of 170 million euros to Man City -- a sum that was 75 percent higher than FC Bayern received from the German league. According to Football Leaks documents, such generous payouts helped make it possible for the club to pay German star Ilkay Gündogan a salary of almost 11 million euros last year, and striker Sergio Agüero more than 18 million. Player salaries paid by Manchester are among the highest in the Premier League.

Despite the high spending, however, the football project in Manchester is now profitable, which doesn't necessarily go without saying, as an internal Man City document from 2012 makes clear. "The football industry is a very fragmented one," the paper reads, "and clubs are the least profitable part of the value chain." The clubs have to buy the rights to players and pay their salaries, the document notes, with better players earning higher salaries. Football associations, media companies and merchandizing firms -- along with players and their advisers -- the document makes clear, have a much better chance at high profits.

To ensure Manchester City got its piece of the money pie, however, team executives designed a structure that the football world had never seen before: a global empire. It was no longer enough to own just one club. A global network of subsidiaries makes it easier to bring in profits -- a lesson Man City has been aware of since 2009.

That year, the Italian trainer Roberto Mancini signed two contracts on the same day: one as the new trainer for the Premier League team Manchester City, and the other as an adviser to the Al Jazira Sports and Cultural Club in the Arabian Gulf League. Sheikh Mansour is behind both clubs. And the numbers in the two contracts were astounding: Al Jazira had committed to pay Mancini, who is today the Italian national team trainer, a higher base salary than Manchester City: The Premier League team would be paying him 1.45 million pounds, before bonuses and incentives, while he would receive a base salary of 1.75 million from the Abu Dhabi club. Annually.

"We have some payments that require to be made by Al Jazira," a City executive in Manchester wrote in September 2011 to his colleagues, clearly explaining what was to take place: "We will need to send monies to ADUG and ADUG will then pass on to Al Jazira with payment instruction." ADUG is the Abu Dhabi United Group, the holding company that owns Manchester City. Its directors are Sheikh Mansour and Mohamed Rashed Mubarak Salem Al Ketbi. ADUG is at the center of all Manchester City efforts to circumvent the Financial Fair Play rules and secretly subsidizes sponsorship deals the club has with companies in Abu Dhabi.

At this time, in other words, a portion of Roberto Mancini's trainer salary was apparently being directed through Al Jazira. The alleged "consulting" contract with the Arab club was seemingly just a pretext. In 2011, at least, money destined for Mancini made its way from Manchester to Al Jazira and then into a discrete offshore shell company in Mauritius named Sparkleglow Holdings.

Neither Al Jazira nor Mancini answered questions submitted by the European Investigative Collaborations (EIC) network of journalists. The club stated it would not respond to the questions. "The attempt to damage the Club's reputation is organized and clear," a spokesperson wrote.

Without systematic rules violations, hidden payments and secret cash injections, Manchester City's success story would not have been possible.

Once a local club, Manchester City is now a global brand, one of several held by the City Football Group (CFG). Just as it is possible to drink the same Starbucks coffee in identical branches, out of identical cups and at the identically exorbitant prices from Seattle to Singapore, Manchester City football affiliates have likewise sprung up on all continents. Manchester City, New York City and Melbourne City, the three flagships, play in sky-blue jerseys and advertise for Abu Dhabi's Etihad airline. But in addition to these teams, Man City owns stakes in league teams in Uruguay, Spain and Japan and has cooperation agreements with clubs in Scandinavia and with an African youth academy.

An internal presentation from 2016 outlines the team's strategy for the Torque farm team in the Uruguayan capital of Montevideo: "Uruguay is an attractive location due to the concentration of quality footballers & limited budgets of local teams," the presentation notes. In other words: the City Football Group hoped to pick off relatively cheap talent and develop them for their use. The presentation notes Torque is "preferable to MCFC" and that "it's local & should lower player acquisition costs." A further positive, according to the documents, is that City didn't need to pay any taxes on profits from player transfers.

The investment in the Spanish club Gironi is also explained in the concept paper: "It's crucial for Academy players development to play in competitive men's football." It argues that this is difficult in England because Manchester City's squad is already too strong. "Means CFG needs to develop other pathways to provide Academy players the opportunity to play." The solution: A Spanish team where the talent can get playing time.

The football subsidiaries function as a place to both park players until they are ready and to test new talent. The global business network is to ensure that the managers discover promising players first and bring them into the CFG system early on so they can have full control of their careers.

Only a small number of actors in the global football business can keep up with this expansion strategy. Sheikh Mansour and the sponsors from Abu Dhabi have invested over 2 billion euros into Manchester City within 10 years. The team is now profitable, but the economic success is rooted in rules violations. And last season, the profit was merely 10 million pounds -- not a great return on the multibillion investment, particularly given that Mansour is continuing to dig deep into his wallet for expensive new players.

From a sporting perspective, the project has succeeded. In its first season under CFG leadership, recently promoted Girona proved itself by finishing in the middle of the pack in the first Spanish league while Torque in Uruguay immediately won promotion. The affiliate club in Melbourne won its first title three years after the CFG takeover.

Sheikh Mansour bought Manchester City in 2008 for 100 million pounds. In 2015, Chinese media mogul Li Ruigang invested 265 million pounds in CFG via a company that is registered in the Cayman Islands, giving him a 13 percent stake. The value of Manchester City has increased by a factor of at least 10 in seven years.

Manchester City Director Khaldoon Al Mubarak has described the involvement of His Highness as follows: "Sheikh Mansour is an astute businessman, who believes you can create a value from football that has not yet been accomplished." His managers haven't just turned Manchester City upside down, but flooded the football world with money and forced it to globalize. The City Football Group represents football capitalism in its purest and most successful form.

In football, it's not just survival of the fittest, it's also survival of the richest.

https://www.spiegel.de/international/wor...-a-1236622.html

a bit more pages please

Chelsea have now lodged an appeal with CAS against their 2 window transfer ban!

I guess they believe in light of the stuff Man City have been up to, what they did pales in comparison!

My eyes are burning up.

Next time I’ll do it in the style of a Mr Men book, with easy to follow sentences and bright, colourful pictures!

They didn't pull any punches with that report did they?

Surely if City haven't cheated they could sue Der Spiegel out of existence now and send UEFA running for cover.

It's right up there with the athletes and cyclists cheating by using performance enhancing drugs.