Bastian
Full Member
- Joined
- Jul 16, 2015
- Messages
- 18,569
- Supports
- Mejbri
Tweet
— Twitter API (@user) date
Interesting read.
They say Alexander the Great saw the breadth of his domain and wept because he had no more worlds to conquer. Manchester City director Simon Pearce saw the breadth of his domain after City walloped Watford 6–0 in the 2019 FA Cup Final. There would be no weeping from Pearce, chief curator of the Abu Dhabi brand and Manchester City’s role within that, but perhaps there was the first nagging sense of doubt. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to have done quite so much conquering? Football trophies are not Pearce’s metric of success, and it had been a difficult week.
In the run up to the cup final there had been troubling reports that UEFA were considering banning the English champions from the Champions League because of violations of spending regulations, but the issue that was probably most pressing on Pearce’s mind was the media’s response to the Watford game. The FA Cup and the domestic treble it secured had been delivered in great style by a remarkably talented group of players under the guidance of their innovative and highly-driven coach, Pep Guardiola, but things had started to sour soon after the final whistle.
First, the Associated Press’s Rob Harris had asked Guardiola in the post-match press conference if City’s victories were diminished by the UEFA investigations, and then followed that up by asking if he had ever received additional third-party payments like his predecessor Roberto Mancini. Harris’s line of questioning certainly seemed to take the shine off Guardiola’s victory. “The day I win the treble and you’re asking me if I received money from other situations?” he fumed. Things deteriorated further when Miguel Delaney’s match report in The Independent appeared. “It is usually in match reports like this that we would now begin to go into the details, the whos, the whys and the hows, but, really, what’s the point?” bemoaned Delaney, who did find space in his article to address the ethical issues surrounding City’s ownership by the Abu Dhabi government: “those are bigger questions to go with all the questions about that regime and human rights abuses and the war in Yemen.”
This was not part of the comms strategy.
We are now more than ten years into Abu Dhabi’s Manchester City project, and at the most interesting juncture.
On the field they are the emerging superpower of European football, but this domination has only sharpened the focus on what goes on off the pitch, and in that regard City are now fighting a war on two fronts. The UEFA investigation will once more pit them against a governing body that has the power to ban them from elite competition and with whom they already have a very difficult relationship. The other battle is with an increasingly skeptical and critical media.
If we want to understand how Manchester City is likely to respond to these new challenges, it’s important to focus again on who is running the club, rather than what is driving their interest. There are still pockets of flat-earthers out there who believe that Manchester City has nothing to do with the Abu Dhabi government, ignoring the fact that the club is nominally owned by the UAE’s Deputy Prime Minister, Sheikh Mansour Al-Nahyan, that club chairman Khaldoon Al-Mubarak is consiglieri to Mansour’s all-powerful brother, the charismatic and ruthless Crown Prince Mohamed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, and that club director Simon Pearce is also the Abu Dhabi government’s long-standing communications director and propagandist in chief. The men who run Manchester City are the same men who run Abu Dhabi and the United Arab Emirates more broadly, and states, unlike many football club owners, usually behave predictably.
So we can expect Manchester City to flex its muscles in much the same way that Abu Dhabi exerts its influence both domestically and internationally; through fantastic wealth, aggressive diplomacy, intimidation, and propaganda — all of it backed up with a capacity for extreme force. In fact, as we’ll see, it looks like they might already have begun.
The UAE’s central role in the disastrous war in Yemen is rightly held up as the most obvious example of its aggression and brutality, but there is another conflict that tells us much about its strategies and tactics. UEFA investigators examining City’s conduct over Financial Fair Play could learn a lot from looking at the UAE’s role in Libya’s bloody civil war.
Financial Fair Play and Anti-Tank Missiles
In November 2018 Der Spiegel-led revelations, based on a trove of emails obtained and released by Football Leaks, provided evidence that Manchester City had funnelled millions of pounds into the club by stealth, in violation of UEFA’s Financial Fair Play regulations. The allegations center around the events of 2014 when City were obviously engorged on petrodollars — the footballing equivalent of a chocolate-smeared Augustus Gloop protesting his innocence to Willy Wonka — but somehow got away with a 20 million Euro fine from UEFA. Der Spiegel lifted the lid on how City cooked the books, including the revelations that they had disguised the source of sponsorship money, set up shell companies and paid manager Roberto Mancini an additional £1.75 million off the books annually — his declared salary was a measly £1.45 million — via the Al Jazira Club in Abu Dhabi. (It was this third-party payment that led Rob Harris to ask Guardiola if his payment arrangements included the same additional benefits) “We are breaching anyway,” wrote City’s Chief Financial Officer in 2011 with City having lost several hundred million pounds and unable to adhere to FPP rules. “We are just relying on mitigating factors to get us through.” In 2012, City’s CFO asked Simon Pearce if it was ok to change the date of payments from sponsors on its books, Pearce replied “Of course, we can do what we want.” Der Spiegel also detailed how City worked behind the scenes to avoid any meaningful sanction. According to an email written by City’s lawyer, “Khaldoon said he would rather spend 30 million on the 50 best lawyers in the world to sue them [UEFA] for the next 10 years” and raised the spectre of “the destruction of their rules and organization.”
What, you might ask, has any of this got to do with Libya? Well, Libya has been in the grip of a civil war since the toppling of Colonel Muammar Gadaffi in 2011, and it has become the focal point of yet another proxy battle between the UAE, which supports authoritarian anti-democratic strongmen, and Qatar, which supports political Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. It has been a bloody and ruinous conflict. In 2014, warring factions “indiscriminately shelled civilian areas” in Libyan cities, according to Human Rights Watch, and “seized people, and looted, burned, and otherwise destroyed civilian property in attacks that in some cases amounted to war crimes”, leading the United Nations to pass Security Council Resolution 2174, which required that a UN committee approve the transfer of arms to Libya. But as the New York Times revealed (in a story based on yet more leaked emails), the UAE decided to simply ignore the resolution and ferried arms to their preferred strongman, former army General Khalifa Hifter. “The fact of the matter is that the U.A.E. violated the U.N. Security Council Resolution on Libya and continues to do so,” said Ahmed al-Qasimi, a senior Emirati diplomat, in an email he wrote on August 4, 2015 to the UAE’s ambassador to the United Nations. Or, to put it another way, they were going to breach anyway. And they had reason to feel confident that they’d get away with it, not least because at the same time as they were running guns into the country, they were in secret negotiationswith the man charged with mediating peace in Libya, UN special representative Bernardino Leon. Leon now earns £35,000-a-month as the Director General of the Abu Dhabi based Emirates Diplomatic Academy. When the news of the Abu Dhabi government’s rule breaking and corruption of officials broke, the man called in to deal with the negative publicity was, of course, Manchester City director Simon Pearce.
“An opportunity presents itself to publish — in ten to fourteen days — a full report on the accusation and the leaked emails for both the UN and Leon,” wrote Pearce on November 13, 2015, the day after the New York Times reported the leak.
In Pearce’s email to senior Ministers in the UAE government — he signs off with a solitary and telling ‘S’ — we see again how Abu Dhabi relies on attack as the best form of defence. Pearce claims that he will provide proof that the Muslim Brotherhood (code for Qatar) hacked the emails that revealed the UAE’s skullduggery. Pearce doesn’t suggest they make any effort to dispute the allegations, instead they should focus on attacking the motives of the messenger. In that regard there is a remarkable similarity with Manchester City’s response to the Football Leaks revelations on City’s financial fair play chicanery: “the attempt to damage the Club’s reputation is organized and clear.” The similarity no doubt reflects the fact that Pearce was in charge of both strategies.
Financial Fair Play prevented Manchester City achieving the supremacy they wanted in European football just like the UN Arms Embargo prevented the UAE gaining supremacy in Libya. In both cases, Qatar was their key adversary in a proxy war. In both cases leaked emails, for which the UAE holds Qatar responsible, revealed the UAE’s complete disregard for the rules, and the fact that they paid people involved vast sums of money to corrupt the system. And what is more, they continue to do so. In June 2019, the New York Times revealed that a cache of powerful US-produced anti-tank missiles had been discovered in the arsenal of General Khalifa Hifter, the UAE’s man in Libya. The marking on the missiles’ shipping containers revealed they were sold to the UAE in 2008. They can do what they want, remember.
So we have a fairly good idea of how City will respond to UEFA. As they did in Libya, Abu Dhabi will stick to their guns. But what of the PR battle with the skeptical press pack? Here it’s useful to look back at how and why City’s slick PR machine has begun to malfunction and more specifically how their supporters have responded to the criticism that has been levelled at their owners.
He Wore A Yellow Ribbon
The problems really began after a 3–0 Carabao Cup final victory over Arsenal in February 2018, when Guardiola used the platform of a post-match press conference to express his solidarity with leaders of the Catalan independence movement. Several of these men had been jailed a few months previously on charges of sedition, rebellion and misappropriation of funds in the aftermath of the Catalan government declaring independence from Spain. After dealing with the usual round of questions about the game itself, Guardiola took the opportunity to call for the release of the imprisoned men. He spoke articulately about the importance of democracy, and the right of people to express their opinion, and railed at the injustice of pre-trial detention. However, Guardiola’s meticulous attention to what happens on the pitch seems to stand in marked contrast to a rather fuzzy grasp of issues off it, and he had apparently failed to note the tension between his comments on Catalonia and the gushing praise for City’s nominal owner, Sheikh Mansour Al Nahyan, that had prefaced them. Mansour is the deputy Prime Minister of a government that doesn’t think twice about disappearing and torturing anyone who expresses either a favourable view of democracy or an unfavourable view of his family’s rule.
When Rob Harris asked Pep how he reconciled his stance on Catalonia with his praise for Mansour, his principles collapsed like the Arsenal defence. “Every country decides the way they want to live for themselves,” said Guardiola. According to Guardiola’s theory of democratic exceptionalism — which in fairness he seemed to make up on the hoof — democracy and free speech is cool for Catalans, but not for the citizens of the government that pays his wages. It was this incident that gave skeptical journalists the hook they needed to ask more probing questions about Abu Dhabi’s stewardship of City, and it came not from searing investigative journalism — City had, with a few notable exceptions been given a free ride by the British press since their takeover of the club in 2008 — but from the blundering hypocrisy of their own manager. Nine months later, in November 2018, this started to become a serious problem.
At the same time as Der Spiegel published a series of splashes that detailed City’s creative accounting, Abu Dhabi’s propensity for arresting and abusing British tourists and businessmen finally made the front pages of the UK press. The abuse of British nationals in the UAE is not rare. (According to a freedom of information request, forty three British nationals complained of torture or ill-treatment in UAE custody between 2010 and 2015, the UAE authorities are still refusing to provide vital evidence to UK coroners in the inquest into the 2011 death in a UAE jail cell of Lee Bradley Brown, and British tourist Ali Issa Ahmad recently made further allegations about serious abuse in UAE detention after he was allegedly beaten up for wearing a Qatar shirt in Abu Dhabi in February 2019.) But what set this new case apart was that it involved a PhD student, Matthew Hedges, and the accusation was that he had been spying for M16. Hedges had been held at an undisclosed location without access to lawyers or British consular officials and subjected to what western torturers might refer to as enhanced interrogation techniques. The club was quickly enmired in the media coverage of the case and the criticism didn’t just come from earnest columnists in the broadsheets. “I suggest every @ManCity fan who cares about justice for a British citizen demands their club’s owner does so, or boycotts games until he does,” thundered Piers Morgan.
We had by this point become accustomed to Manchester City fans arguing the toss — some more intelligently than others — over FFP, so it wasn’t a surprise to see them railing at Der Spiegel, but the response of some City fans to the Matt Hedges case broke new ground, as noted by Guardian journalist Barney Ronay . “It’s actually happening! Not a parody. Man City fans on Twitter are backing Abu Dhabi’s legal processes and suggesting, well, not everyone gets locked up you know… humans are doomed.” It would be wrong to say that City fans came out en masse in defence of Abu Dhabi’s abuse of a UK citizen but many did, and a majority of online City seemed to be furious at the notion that they might finally express some concerns about the behaviour of the people running their club. “So bizarre, it’s worth reiterating,” wrote Jonathan Wilson, reflecting on the incident months later. “A proportion of supporters of a football club in the north-west of England decided to back the flawed legal apparatus of an oppressive regime 4,500 miles away against a British man who, whether he had been spying or not, had been treated appallingly for six months. This is sportswashing in action: the Abu Dhabi state had funded the Pep Guardiola revolution and so had to be supported in all matters, including possible human rights abuses.”
The predictable response of City’s online fanbase was to call anyone who criticised their owners a hypocrite. This was a legitimate accusation to level at Piers Morgan, who is apparently unaware that his own team, Arsenal, is effectively sponsored by the government of Dubai, the second most powerful emirate in the United Arab Emirates after Abu Dhabi, but City fans generally seemed to miss the point and take the criticism of their owners’ abuses personally.
It would be a mistake to either trivialize this response or to regard it as extraordinary. The City fans who cast doubt on Hedges and expressed their faith in UAE justice in many respects behaved as we should have expected them to — like passionate football fans with a deep sense of attachment to their club.
A visceral sense of one-ness
One person who fully understands the destructive (and constructive) potential of the bonds between supporters and clubs is Dr Martha Newson, a researcher on cognitive and evolutionary anthropology at the University of Oxford.
Martha Newson’s interest in football began at Selhurst Park when she was still a Masters student. Fascinated by the crowd and the clamour, Newson got her notebook out and started furiously scribbling notes, to the horror of her then boyfriend. But the Crystal Palace fans surrounding her were eager subjects. “All the fans were coming up to me and asking me to write things down. Football fans are very happy to chat about the experience of being a fan and their attachment,” she told me over the phone. Newson has tapped into this enthusiasm with relish, and is now a leading researcher on the psychological concept of identity fusion as it applies to football supporters. Identity fusion is, to quote one of Newson’s numerous peer-reviewed articles, “a particularly potent form of pro-group commitment” that has been studied in at least 16 countries across six continents in groups as diverse as military veterans, US college fraternity/sorority members, martial arts practitioners, and religious or nationalist fundamentalists. A 2014 study on north African insurgents, for example, found “family-like bonds between fighters and their battalions” and attributed this to identity fusion. According to Newson and her fellow researchers, people who are strongly fused to a group experience “a visceral sense of oneness” between their personal identity and their social or group identity. Critically and most pertinently, “this synergy motivates a wide range of personally costly, pro-group actions because for fused persons, threats to the group are interpreted also as personal threats.” Newson has taken the theory and applied it to football supporters, doing research on hardcore Brazilian supporter groups as well as empirical research on English supporters. And what is more, Newson and her fellow researchers have also identified that dysphoric experiences (the opposite of euphoric experiences) create stronger bonds and more highly fused individuals. So, I ask Newson, would supporters of a club who for decades were associated with tragic, borderline comedic failure, be more predisposed to identity fusion? Not only is the answer a resounding yes, Newson has data to back it up. “Manchester City fans are highly fused compared to the other top four clubs in the Premiership” - a finding she will outline in detail in an upcoming research article.
At this point, it’s important to stress that this is not an attack on Manchester City fans, whom the research presents simply as human football supporters, albeit ones whose collective traumas from the pre-Mansour era may have intensified their attachment to their club. Newson is careful to note that her research findings primarily demonstrate City fans’ commitment to their club, and points out that this can often translate into very positive actions. I should also be clear that, as someone with a background in human rights research and advocacy, I don’t think City fans have any responsibility to lead on these issues. But the notion that they have no influence over these matters is fanciful, and the men in charge of City — perhaps more than any other football club owners- understand the potency of fans as a social group. Under the rule of Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Sheikh Mansour’s brother and the real power behind Manchester City, Abu Dhabi has turned the United Arab Emirates into a chauvinistic warrior state; its citizens are expected to demonstrate their loyalty towards their rulers, whether in the form of their attacks on neighbouring Qatar or their full-throated support for the UAE’s involvement in regional conflicts, notably Yemen. Loyalty and support provides a foundation for the exercise of power and it’s inconceivable that the powers in Abu Dhabi did not notice how City fans circled the wagons and acted as the frontline of defence to media criticism.
Simon Pearce, in particular, would have noted the existence of another group of Cityzens — the term coined by the club itself for its supporters — willing to defend their leaders come what may. Pearce might not be familiar with the dysphoric pathway to identity fusion but he knows an opportunity when he sees one and since 2018 we have seen a new phase in City’s PR operations, and one that has coincided with the emergence of some conspicuous social media activity.
Welcome to Trollerball
As the criticism of the club intensified in the run up to their securing of the treble, City began to come out of their shell with the punchier, more aggressive style that is characteristic of the manner in which Abu Dhabi acts on the international area.
On May 15, City accused UEFA of “an unsatisfactory, curtailed and hostile process” and said that UEFA’s club financial control body investigatory chamber had ignored “a comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence” in referring allegations of financial fair play irregularities to UEFA’s adjudicatory chamber. The day before, City denied there was anything inappropriate about a terrace chant sung by its players on a plane back to Manchester after winning the match that secured them the English Premiership. The chant talks of Liverpool fans being ‘battered on the streets’ at the 2018 Champions League final in Kiev, and also contains the lyric ‘victims of it all.’ The most generous assessment would be that it is deeply distasteful. City’s public statement was stout in its defence not just of the players, but of the song: “The song in question, which has been a regular chant during the 2018/19 season, refers to the 2018 Uefa Champions League final in Kiev. Any suggestion that the lyrics relate to Sean Cox or the Hillsborough tragedy is entirely without foundation.” Two weeks later, City’s Chairman, Khaldoon Al-Mubarak, accused La Liga president Javier Tebas of racism after Tebas had called Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain, which is owned by Qatar, “playthings of a state” run off petrol and gas. “I think there’s something deeply wrong in bringing ethnicity into the conversation,” Al-Mubarak said, bringing ethnicity into the conversation. “This is just ugly, I think the way he is combining teams just because of ethnicity. I find that very disturbing, to be honest.”
Meanwhile, over on social media, something genuinely disturbing was happening. A few months previously, an anonymous account bearing the avatar of City striker Sergio Aguero logged in to Twitter for the first time. Initially it lay largely dormant, but its activity picked up at the same time as Man City’s PR offensive and at the time of writing it has gathered 7,500 followers, many of whom hail the man behind the account, known as Rabin, as the second coming: a speaker of truths who exposed the hypocrisy of the anti-City press pack and led the fightback against those who sought to tarnish the club’s reputation.
“I may be wrong but the media treatment of club & fans crossed a line, went into a land where you could accuse City’s boardroom of being filled with blood, or turn in a formulaic article about Sportswashing both with no evidence” mused Rabin in a notable thread posted on June 5. “A reporter could get up and ask a question to the manager at the moment of epic achievement if he has taken money on the side, with zero evidence and the rest of the media praising him for it. He could start a taunting the club and the manager for a lack of response on his Twitter feed,” he went on in reference to Rob Harris. “A few more times and that questions would have gone from a veiled allegation to a fact. With push back from the fans the taunting has stopped.” The thread bumbled on, accusing Tariq Panja of the New York Times of “playing fast and easy with facts” and of misrepresenting official responses given to him by the Manchester City’s communications team. It closes with some humble pie, “I’m just adding my voice to push back in the little way I can” and a call to arms “I’m addressing the elephant in the room. I hope others do too.” The syntax is odd — Rabin is clearly not from anywhere near Manchester — but the message is clear: we, the fans, can fight back and silence the journalists attacking our club.
And it is Rabin who has led the charge, churning out lengthy conspiratorial threads that are devoid of substance, but which provide succour and reassurance to people who desperately want to believe that criticism of City’s owners is rooted in prejudice, not reason. Almost without fail, those most susceptible to Rabin’s portentous reasoning have avatars and Twitter handles that are indicative of what Martha Newson might call a rather porous boundary between their personal self and their social identity as a Manchester City supporters, and these people can then be corralled into attacking and smearing journalists. When you strip most of the lines of attacks on journalists down, most of it comes back to them…..eh…being journalists. For example, Rob Harris only asked Guardiola awkward questions because he has appeared on Al Jazeera (it’s owned by Qatar ergo Harris is a Qatar-funded anti-City stooge). Barney Ronay wrote a book about the Russia 2018 World Cup and not a book about human rights abuses in Chechnya, so he’s obviously a hypocrite. Miguel Delaney, who has come in for the most severe abuse, is a hypocrite simply because he writes for The Independent, and they have licensed their brand to a group with links to the highly abusive Saudi Arabian state. The list of people who have had some sort of Rabin treatment is of course much longer and includes Nick Harris, Ewan Mackenna, James Montague, Duncan Castles, and John Nicholson, all of whom have asked awkward questions about the Manchester City project. In amongst the orchestrated attacks on journalists there are some more interesting threads, like the thread on serious allegations of professional misconduct levelled at UEFA’s chief investigator Yves Le Terme, which, as ever, ends with Rabin tagging a series of influential online accounts.
So who is Rabin? Well, this is something he — or she — does not like to discuss. His identity can never be revealed, for reasons that he has never made clear. In June, as questions about his identity and motivations began to raise suspicions, an incident that nearly resulted in his unveiling led to his brief departure from Twitter amidst a blaze of videod accusations and counter-accusations that I would discourage anyone from watching in full.
The internet is a strange place and it’s possible that Rabin is just a highly fused City fan with a talent for misdirection and a lot of time on his hands, but his is not the only suspicious anonymous account churning out lines of attack, and there is a far more plausible explanation for his activities. It’s one that makes little sense if you think of Manchester City as a traditional football club, but it makes perfect sense if you think of Manchester City as a propaganda tool for the Abu Dhabi government.
Dr Marc Owen Jones is an expert on the Gulf states’ social media propaganda campaigns and there are lines from his 2019 paper “Propaganda, Fake News, and Fake Trends: The Weaponization of Twitter Bots in the Gulf Crisis” that leap off the page, notably the characterizations of propaganda, which serve as remarkably accurate descriptions of Rabin’s timeline: “the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist”; and “a one-sided account of affairs that can include bias, obvious falsehoods, deliberate misinformation, and unsubstantiated allegations”. Jones skillfully links these concepts to the Gulf state’s weaponization of social media within the region, which serves both as a central pillar of their rule and a means of attacking their enemies.
Gulf bot armies is one thing, but would Abu Dhabi go so far as to use online propaganda as a means of systematically attacking UK journalists who have criticised Manchester City? Well, the simple answer to that is, yes, they almost certainly would. The UAE has a long record of smearing its critics, as documented in a 2018 report by the UK-based organisation Spinwatch which details the UAE’s well-funded attempts to “undermine, vilify and smear groups and individuals that pose a perceived ideological and political threat to that country.” Not surprisingly, Khaldoon Al-Mubarak and Simon Pearce get honourable mentions in the report. That doesn’t mean that this online activity is part of an Abu Dhabi dirty tricks campaign, of course, but it certainly fits their modus operandi. Marc Owen Jones is better qualified than anyone to assess the possibility that Rabin is an online shill for hire. “His speech seems very on message and almost scripted, and his attempts to appear genuine somewhat hackneyed,” says Jones. “His [Rabin’s] anonymity does not make any sense and is suspicious… and the rhetorical devices he uses and the logical fallacies he deploys are the staple of PR companies” Jones points out that online shills and fake grassroots campaigns — a practice known as astroturfing — are now part of the packages offered by western PR companies, and refers to the February 2019 revelations that Tory strategist Lynton Crosby had offered to run just such a campaign as part of a £5.5 million package designed to strip Qatar of the 2022 World Cup. And, of course, the government that has been most keen on stripping Qatar of the World Cup is the same government that runs Manchester City.
All of which is to say that if Rabin is not part of an online propaganda campaign paid for by Abu Dhabi, then he should send Simon Pearce his CV and an invoice. If he is, then people — including policymakers and those in charge of football governance — need to pay attention.
Elite european football is now drenched in petrodollars, and English football is in danger of following suit. The proposed Qatari investment in Leeds United would almost certainly make them a powerful force as would any serious Gulf investment in Newcastle United — whether that be from figures in the UAE or Saudi Arabia — and the apocalypse scenario is the long-mooted sale of Manchester United to the Saudi royal family. The Gulf’s despots have a talent for bringing dystopia to life and it is entirely possible that the English Premiership will become the next proxy battleground for their feuds. If it does, we can expect them to bring their bot armies with them, and we can look forward to the unedifying spectacle of legions of highly fused fans defending their respective owners’ depravities. Welcome to Trollerball.
