From the very start, the project was the tip of a soft-power campaign to entrench the tiny Emirate deep in the British economy. 

Now, 18 years later, it has emerged that the club was at the heart of the largest cheating scheme in English soccer history. And as City, which denies any wrongdoing, awaits an unprecedented penalty for financial doping, the scandal has rippled all the way to new Prime Minister Andy Burnham.

The predicament is especially awkward for Burnham, who built much of his political appeal on his everyman soccer-fan image, but now finds himself caught between a major investor in the U.K. economy and defending the integrity of the Premier League, Britain’s most popular cultural export since the Beatles.

“This does need to be done carefully without everybody jumping in and providing their conclusions,” said Burnham, who in his previous job as mayor of Manchester lobbied against punishing his beloved Everton for similar, smaller-scale infractions.

The U.K. has spent much of the past decade wooing the U.A.E. to invest in the country in an attempt to kick-start its slow-growing economy. A Sovereign Investment Partnership between the two counties, announced in 2021, initially targeting £10 billion over five years, has already seen nearly £30 billion committed across more than 50 direct investments. 

State investment vehicles such as Mubadala and Masdar poured billions into U.K. offshore wind, clean tech, life sciences and fiber-optic networks. The $250 million that Abu Dhabi United Group spent in 2008 to acquire Manchester City—at the behest of Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan—now seems like small change.

So when the Premier League revealed that the club had been found guilty of over 100 breaches of its rules on spending, Burnham’s immediate concern was that the U.A.E. would take its money elsewhere.

“I would be really concerned to lose them,” Burnham told the BBC shortly after the Premier League’s verdict. “They’ve been such a huge partner in the building of modern Manchester. Obviously, the building of Manchester City into the global force that it is.” 

Through it all, Burnham has had a front-row seat. When he became mayor of Manchester in 2017, he inherited a rare Northern English urban success story, as the city boomed thanks in part to an infusion of petrostate dollars.

Beyond the club, which let the U.A.E. reach millions of global fans of the world’s most popular sports league, Man City’s owners flooded their backyard with cash. They spent £200 million on a youth soccer academy, while pouring millions into a large real-estate development in the east of Manchester.

City Football Group also invested in the Co-op Live, the U.K.’s biggest indoor arena, a short walk from the team’s Etihad Stadium (which happened to be sponsored by Abu Dhabi’s flagship airline). 

And right at the center of it were two of the U.A.E.’s most powerful people. One is Sheikh Mansour, who controls Mubadala and is the younger brother of President Mohamed bin Zayed. The other is Khaldoon Al Mubarak, a key aide to the two brothers. A suave, Tufts-educated figure, Mubarak sits on Abu Dhabi’s powerful Executive Council and helps oversee the country’s vast wealth funds and some of its biggest state-owned enterprises. 

Mubarak also serves as chairman of Manchester City. 

For nearly a decade under his stewardship, the club was accused of orchestrating “sham contracts” to overstate the value of sponsorship deals and secretly funnel in money from its owners to spend lavishly on players and coaches far beyond what was permitted by Premier League rules, which were designed specifically to limit cash injections from uber-wealthy investors. Overall, the investigation found, City concealed the true source of more than $1.1 billion in funding while lying to the league and investigators. Potential punishments range from fines and points deductions to expulsion from the league. The club has appealed the decision.

“This disciplinary case, and this decision, are the most significant in Premier League history,” Premier League chief executive Richard Masters said.

Just days before the announcement, however, the U.K. business secretary hosted Mubarak at Downing Street. A spokesman for the U.K. government said that the meeting focused on investment and the issues around Man City weren’t discussed. 

The concern among U.K. government officials is that the current treatment of Man City might cause Abu Dhabi to sour on Britain and shut off the investment spigot.

The government is still haunted by a failed push by the U.A.E. in 2013 to have the U.K. designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. That led Abu Dhabi to pull billions of dollars of orders for a U.K.-made jet fighter.

“We have had these episodes before,” said Christopher Davidson, an academic who has written extensively about the U.A.E. royal family. “It does fit into an established pattern in many ways.”

More recently a joint-venture backed by Sheikh Mansour attempted to acquire control of the Daily Telegraph newspaper and the Spectator magazine. Concerns over foreign state control of British news outlets prompted the U.K. government to pass legislation restricting foreign states from owning U.K. newspaper assets, causing the deal to collapse.

The U.K. government—trying to defuse the situation—is playing up its role as a trusted military partner, pointing out it dispatched the Royal Air Force this spring alongside U.A.E. forces to down drones and missiles fired from Iran.

As for Manchester City, the club can only wait until the Premier League issues its sanctions, eight years after it first opened an investigation.

“There remain many who want to undermine the momentum of our club,” Mubarak said before the verdict was confirmed. “We will not give them that opportunity.”