Questions behind the club’s treble win

June 2023

The news and sports pages were full of Man City’s win in Istanbul securing them the magic treble. There were clips of the various goals, a celebratory homecoming and interviews and profiles of the various players. Fans were exultant. There were reportedly 100,000 of them to greet the team back in Manchester and considerable attention was paid to one of the players, Jack Grealish and his actions after the win. The tabloids had pages of coverage and hundreds of comments joining in the celebrations. For the owners of the club, it could not have exceeded their wildest dreams. Masses of positive coverage. There is talk of a photo of the club appearing on the cover of the next Oasis album.

So it may seem a little churlish to mention background to the win and to say something about the owners of the club who are an oppressive state. United Arab Emirates who have poured vast sums into the club – around £500m to enable them to buy the best players – are no strangers to criticisms of their human rights record. Many activists and academics are detained and their families often harassed by state officials. There are arbitrary arrests and the used of torture is widespread. Trials are unfair and victims are denied legal counsel. There is no press freedom or freedom of speech generally. There are forced disappearances and stoning and flogging are still practised. The state is near the bottom of many international measures of human rights and press freedoms. What they have is vast wealth from oil and that wealth is being used by a number of middle east states to buy their way into the sporting universe.

Other examples include the World Cup held improbably in Qatar and Saudi Arabia’s purchase of Newcastle United Football Club. Just recently, the Saudis have taken over the PGA (golf) and merged it with the smaller LIV series. The gulf states are in their various ways engaged in using sport to enhance their reputations in what is called sportswashing. They have realised that sport brings huge reputational benefits and the millions who watch or spectate sport show little interest in where the money comes from so long as their team or hero wins a trophy of some kind.

However, it does matter for a number of reasons:

• Manchester City, and the other clubs going down this high money road, have effectively become state sides. It is not Manchester City but the UAE trading as Manchester City which has become a kind of front for a repressive regime. They are merely serving a purpose for this state to launder its reputation, safe in the knowledge that the supporters simply want to revel in success. It may only have been Channel 4 which raised questions about ownership along with the financial cheating the club is alleged to have engaged in (which they deny).
• Other clubs will have little option to follow and seek funding from some country wanting to launder their reputations. Until the Ukraine invasion, Russian money from the oligarchs was the main source of wealth for example Chelsea FC and Abramovich.
• The acceptance of funding from gulf states such as UAE and others ignores the moral dimension completely. Sport sits happily at the back of most newspapers or at the end of TV news bulletins where the breathless talk is of who won what, league tables, the activities of sporting stars, who has been injured and so on. That the states hosting these events or funding clubs and competitions, are engaged in inflicting misery or death on those who disagree with them or who wish for democracy, scarcely gets a mention.
• That sportswashing helps entrench their power is also seemingly of little concern. The people of Manchester are naturally overjoyed at their club’s success (unless you are a United supporter that is). Telling them that their favourite club is a ‘front’ for a fairly despicable regime is not something they are likely to want to hear.

The use of sport to enable these regimes to gain political respectability is likely to increase as others see how successful it is. It helps facilitate arms sales and the entry of the regime leaders into polite society. Our Royal family for example, from the late Queen down, often hosted visits from the likes of Sheik Mohammed because of a shared love of horses.

Such is the significance of sport now and its use as a political cover, it maybe time for it to emerge from the back pages and for us to start asking questions about its role as a cover for anti-democratic states. Sporting success should not be the be-all and end-all.

Sources: Guardian, Private Eye, Wikipedia