I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my own moral & political engagement in the football club I love, Manchester City. I do not claim to be an expert on any of the issues of global finance, accountancy, the politics of the Middle East and the Persian Gulf or even, if I’m honest, football. All I am here is a fan, who has read, discussed and reacted to endless newspaper articles, blogs, podcasts and miscellaneous pigeon posts about my club, and who has developed some opinions along the way. I don’t claim my views represent all City fans, or even any others, but I suspect if I think something, a lot of other fans do too.
When I’m not thinking about football, I’m usually thinking about politics. I first joined Amnesty International as a 16 year old in 1983. I’ve been engaged in a succession of political and humanitarian movements ever since. I am the Chair of the board of a national charity. I’m unashamedly of the radical left. Not surprisingly, I am anything but an admirer of the ruling royal families of the United Arab Emirates, their political and social repression, their religious fundamentalism or their business activities. Nonetheless I have found myself sucked in to their world. The couple of thousand words below are my attempt to place my personal position as a football fan and City fan in the context of the ownership of my club.
To begin, some quick personal context. I moved from Scotland to Manchester in 1992 and took a house in Rusholme/Moss Side, just yards from Maine Road, and I started going to a few matches. My arrival in Manchester coincided exactly with the ascent of Fergie’s babes & the beginning of United’s greatest period of dominance. I could have donned red to match my politics, but as an inveterate champion of the underdog, I fell just a little in love with hapless City as they tumbled out of the Premier League down one, then two divisions, before storming back up with some blistering celebrations of joyous football under Royle and Keegan. Around that time I read Colin Shindler’s wonderful fan memoir ‘Manchester United Ruined My Life’ and by then, for sure, I knew that Manchester’s blues are my people and always will be.
I tell you this in part because, in these very different times, I have occasionally been called a ‘glory hunter’ which makes me laugh. Guys, I’m a City fan. I am, by definition, a misery-hunter. Why do you think they call us the blues?
Jump forward a few years, and in an entirely unforeseen development, I find myself supporting one of the most brilliant, spectacular and increasingly successful football team that British — even world — football has ever known. What can I say? Shit happens.
This year, as Spring sprang into Summer, English football fans were treated to one of the most breathtaking and thrilling title chases of the Premier League era or any other. A magnificent Liverpool team (successive Champions League finalists and soon-to-be European Champions) scored more points than they had ever scored in their history, and indeed more points than any other team has ever scored — with one exception. Manchester City, in the year after notching up a historic hundred points, scraped home in 2018/19 with a 98 point total that sealed the title by a point. It was an intense, exhausting, unprecedented title chase, competed for mostly in an unusually sporting spirit of mutual respect and admiration between two brilliant managers and sets of players, if not always the fans. (What can I say? Fans gonna fan.) City then went on to complete an unprecedented domestic treble by doling out a proper thrashing to Watford in the FA Cup Final.
In the weeks since, we should have been basking in the wondrous sporting achievements we’ve witnessed, taking a breather, enjoying the Women’s World Cup & a bit of cricket before pulling up our sleeves and preparing to do it all over again. Instead, like most City fans, I have found myself doggedly wading through accusations that we all-but cheated our way to success, that we have blood on our hands, or in the exact words of one Guardian podcasters, that we should either just stop supporting our team or else “look to our consciences.”
In the few days after the Cup final, all of this came across as dismally pathetic sour grapes from people unwilling to accept that the treble had been won because a group of good players had been turned by a managerial genius into a superlative team, a whole far greater than its parts. It’s gone on since then, becoming increasingly hysterical and increasingly devoid of barest efforts at evidence or reason.
A lot of the Tweets, blogs and articles said things like “City fans need to think about this.” Believe you me, we have. Over a period of about a decade between 1998 and 2008 we had watched as Manchester City Council effectively merged with the board of Manchester City FC; dragged the club back from the literal brink of bankruptcy and oblivion; used our club as a bargaining chip to attract and finance the 2002 Commonwealth Games; moved our club from the much-loved drafty old shed in Moss Side to the shiny new, often soulless, cavernous space of the City of Manchester Stadium; and then use that to leverage eye-watering levels of investment from Sheikh Mansour and the Abu Dhabi United Group which ultimately floated the moribund local economy of the entire city, paid for the regeneration of huge swathes of East Manchester, and brought new schools, parks, sports centres and housing estates to some of the most deprived neighbourhoods in Britain.
I’m sure it was actually more prolonged, but in my memory there was one day at the end of August 2008 when City fans were told that we were now owned by the royal family of Abu Dhabi, the stadium was now called the Etihad and oh by the way, we’ve just signed Robinho from Real Madrid. PS your ticket just went up 20%.
To say that City fans and our wishes were secondary to other concerns in all of this would be a lie. We weren’t secondary. We were absolutely 100% irrelevant. No one asked what we thought about any of it, and when we did say that actually you know what, we don’t really like any of this, we were entirely ignored. It’s rarely mentioned that a lot of City fans didn’t like the new stadium, didn’t like the ethos, didn’t like the new TV-driven megabucks culture of Premier League football and stopped going. You’ll still see them in every pub in Manchester on game days, still sweating blue beads, but preferring to watch the match over a pint of Holts than from the folding seats of the Colin Bell Stand. City till they die, which in the case of many of them, probably won’t be too long now, bless ‘em.
So, on to the present day and the heaps of ordure being piled on to City fans. Here is my position — I am deeply concerned about human rights in the Gulf states and elsewhere. I am well aware of the appalling repression of political dissent in the Gulf region, notably workers’ rights, women’s right, LGBT rights, migrant rights, and political and religious freedoms. I am horrified by the humanitarian crisis caused by the unjust war in Yemen. As a football fan, I am conscious that our influence is minor but perhaps not negligible. I would love to use whatever influence I have to make things any better.
So here is my issue. The vast majority of opinion, comment and analysis that has appeared in recent weeks has not inspired me in any way to become more engaged in issues around the ownership of my club or to use my position in a positive way. It has served to utterly alienate me, to distrust the faith and motivations of those making the attacks and to do anything other than be seen to be siding with the people making the attacks. Let’s be blunt. I’m a radical left politico. I’ve even been known to write for the Guardian. If you can’t persuade me, you’re not going to persuade anyone.
But I don’t want this to be a whinge. I want to do something constructive here. Rather than squabble with named individuals and the arguments that have served to enrage rather than engage, I thought I would offer a few constructive words, from a City fan to human rights activists, journalists, commentators, pundits and random social media bigmouths as to how you can talk about these issues in a way that might actually get you somewhere, at least with City fans. I appreciate this might not be your objective, but at least then we’ll all know where we stand. And to other City fans, I hope you can use this to have a think and a chat among ourselves about how we can maybe get better at responding to some of this shit?
1. Separate the issues of the team’s brilliance from the ownership. City fans know full well we had a huge sack of cash land in our laps in 2008 and the club has used that to buy a squad of players who are good enough to compete at the top level of the Premier League and in Europe. Of course, without the money, we couldn’t have done what we’ve done. We did not, however, buy our victories. We never followed the Galactico model. We have never paid over the odds to distort the market or gazump our rivals for a player. Not a single one of the 20 most expensive transfers in football history has gone to Man City. Yes, our overall net spend is the biggest, but we were starting from a very low base to build a world class squad, and that costs more. Anyway, that seems to have levelled out a few years ago and now, both in the transfer market and on the pitch, we are competing absolutely fairly with our rivals in the top echelons of world football, those we beat fair and square in England and who, so far, have beaten us fair and square in Europe. That is sport. Football is a gazillion pound game and you need to spend untold millions to get to the big money table and untold millions more to stay there. To actually win requires a lot more than money. City fans don’t mind being told their team is expensive and that our success is a result of great, laughably bizarre fortune. We do object to being told we cheated.
2. Separate the issues of human rights and financial fair play. Now I’m sure somewhere out there are geeky souls who both understand and genuinely care about the labyrinthine maze of UEFA’s financial regulations. Perhaps a few of them are football fans. But what should be clear to anyone is that FFP rules have been built up by UEFA (who have been over decades, let’s not forget, just about the most shamelessly corrupt organisation on the global stage) to protect the vested interests of their oldest & most powerful member clubs against nouveau riche new kids on the block like City and PSG. Leaving aside wider issues with the owners, it’s a downright weird set of rules that would punish one club for pumping billions-worth of fresh money into the game and the surrounding social and physical infrastructure of the city, while considering it perfectly fine that just across town another owner is stripping billions out of the club and the game to swell the coffers of a US corporate franchise.
Perhaps you really, truly care about the morality of paying a former manager a bonus from Bank de Suisse capital investment account 7Gx6798864/Z when it should have been paid from revenue investment account 7Gx6798865/K, and good luck to you, but I’m not losing any sleep. Manchester City is a multinational company that will employ a team of the best accountants money can buy to find the tricksiest loopholes imaginable to outwit the team of accountants employed by UEFA and I, and every City fan, is absolutely fine with that — in truth I’d be disappointed if they were not making every possible effort to do so.
Just to be clear, I’m not saying anybody should refrain from talking or writing about FFP, whether City’s critics or fans. I am not saying (and genuinely don’t yet know) whether any of MCFC’s creative accountancy does or did cross lines of honesty, legality or fairness. I am saying that if you throw FFP in with every other concern you have, it will look like you’re just throwing enough shit at the wall in the hope that some will stick.
3. Talk about the principles, not the specifics of one club. Do you want changes in the FA rules about, for example, what it means to be a fit and proper person to own a football club? Do you think corporations or individuals with connections to dictatorial regimes and abuses of human rights should not be allowed to own British football clubs? Well fine, that’s a good argument and I broadly agree with it. I just think that should apply to all clubs, not just Manchester City. Whatever new rules you are likely to be drawing up, you are highly likely to be taking a hell of a lot of other Premier League and global clubs down with us, so let’s talk about the full picture.
Alternatively, do you think there should be a policy of boycotts, divestment and sanctions against the coalition responsible for wholesale mass murder of civilians in Yemen? Or against countries which seriously violate human rights & repress women & LGBT people? Great. I would be personally more than happy if City’s owners were kicked out of the country and out of the game as part of a co-ordinated global campaign to end the war. What I cannot accept is Man City being expected to shoulder all the approbation and blame when there are 6,000 other British companies who together go to make up the largest investment in Abu Dhabi by any nation state on Earth, who appear to do so without anyone caring a jot. More glaringly, there is nothing more ludicrous than expecting a football club — and within that, football fans — to be the conscience of the nation when British arms companies, with the full blessing of the British government, are making and selling the very armaments and bombs that are causing much of the slaughter.
4. Don’t ask City fans to grovel in apology. Ask us to help. One of the more simplistic ideas floated about ADG’s ownership of MCFC is that it is all about ‘sportswashing’ — the buying of good PR through association with the world’s most popular sport. Of course image, reputation and respect are incredibly important to the Sheikhs and their companies, but this investment runs far beyond sportswashing. It is all about cold, hard business. The Abu Dhabi Group are expanding beyond petrodollars into other realms, and the top tier of football is now a massive cornerstone of global capitalism. The City of Manchester has become a petri-dish for a new business model. To be only slightly trite about it, if this was about sportswashing, it’s been bloody useless. It has succeeded only in attracting massive spotlights and detailed scrutiny to every corner of the political and corporate culture in the UAE, and look, here we all are now reading all about it, yet again.
As for the role of City fans, it would flatter us to call us inconsequential. We have no say in this. We have no power in this. We could not stop it if we wanted to. (I honestly don’t know how many City fans would want to fight to scrap or keep the current ownership, even if we could. I guess it would depend on what the alternative would be. The bottom line is we don’t and never will so the question is redundant.)
So where does that leave us? Fans will not be made to feel guilty about loving our team, celebrating our successes, loving our players, loving our manager, loving our badge. Just as the club is bigger than any of those, so too is the club much, much bigger than the ownership. We, as fans, will not apologise for our team’s brilliance or our club’s success, nor will we let you tarnish those with unfair allegations. But we know too that the owners and the wider business community in UAE is indeed sensitive to image concerns. That sensitivity is amplified, not diluted, by their ownership of MCFC. Football is now an exchange square for soft power — the capacity to use culture to influence other cultures to your economic and political advantage. That’s what City’s owners are doing in Manchester. It’s also what Premier League football is returning in spades.
What do I mean by that? Well look what happens when the MCFC Twitter account Tweets about support for LGBT rights. It has an impact across the world, and often results in prominent squabbles between the club’s local supporters and some from the Arabic world and beyond. City’s investment in women’s football has in many ways been more dramatic (if obviously on a lower scale) than their influence on the men’s game. That too is noticed, in parts of the world where women’s sports are massively restricted.
On a specific example, when last year British academic Matthew Hedges was imprisoned and arrested on dodgy spying charges in the Emirates, I was one of many City fans who responded to Amnesty’s Urgent Action requests to email the authorities, and I stressed my relationship with the club as one of my reasons to care about the case. I’m not saying it makes a difference when I do this on my own. I’m saying it does make a difference when thousands of us do the same. It’s worth noting that Hedges was indeed quickly pardoned as a consequence of the combined international pressure.
Please understand I am not arguing that the ADG’s ownership of the club is a moral good, but I am arguing that it presents opportunities, it is not a one way street, that in a world of exploitation, suffering and pain, football can be a force for good. I sincerely believe that if a more constructive dialogue could be opened between City fans and activists seeking positive political change, solidarity and progress in the Gulf states and around the world, then City fans could be a hugely powerful voice. But this will not and cannot work if it is based around asking fans to renounce their club or grovel in shame or apology for a situation for which we are not responsible and not to blame.
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It seems evident to me that the overwhelming majority of critical attacks on City fans have boiled down to nothing more than calls for City fans to be ashamed of their club instead of proud. I fail to see what this achieves for anyone. Sure, this is par for the course if we’re hearing from @CantonaLeDieu4Eva along the Mancunian Way or @MadKoppite97865357 from down the M62. When it’s coming from the senior football reporters of our national broadsheet press, or self-appointed human rights experts, it’s rather less forgivable or understandable.
In a classic dynamic of the social media age, the telling of the story has now become the story. A crude caricature of the interchange goes like this:
FOOTBALL JOURNALIST: Manchester City is a dirty club that has murdered and cheated its way to worthless victories and is now killing football.
CITY FAN ON TWITTER: Oh piss off, you twat.
FOOTBALL JOURNALIST: And now Manchester City fans are leaping to the defence of the brutal dictatorship of the UAE, they are complicit stooges, trolls and probably paid shills of the regime.
CITY FANS ON TWITTER: No, really, feck you.
FOOTBALL JOURNALIST: You see? PROOF! They’re just a bunch of abusive trolls.
It is an entirely corrosive, toxic dynamic, and I, for one, have had enough. If you have too, please get in touch. Let’s see what we can do about it.
