And yet the vision of the club with overseas subsidiaries was not Khaldoon’s or that of anyone else in AD - it was Ferran Soriano’s, and Barca’s refusal to run with that vision was one of the reasons he left. I don’t doubt that in AD they grasped the significance of his vision and what it could mean for AD but I don’t think that was always part of the plan - it seems to me that the simple idea of owning a top flight ‘sleeping giant’ football club in England probably started life as a solid business proposition and only after the purchase did it grow into something that could portray AD in a positive light, which in turn that grew into a project that would renovate a huge area of East Manchester, which in turn grew into the City Group, and so on. I agree the potential significance of the project is exactly why they have some very big hitters on the case, but equally I don’t think that necessarily suggests anything more than that the worldwide profile that English premier league football has means that whatever City/ the City Group does has the capacity to show AD up in a good or bad light. It may have greater significance than that, but the article we are all discussing doesn’t persuade me in the slightest.
Nor do I think it is naive to think that Khaldoon’s initial involvement in the project owes as much to his personal relationship with Sheikh Mansour as anything else. I agree that Khaldoon’s involvement from the early days demonstrates that AD understood the need to manage the thing properly, and so Khaldoon was parachuted in when Al Fahim was causing such amusement. But again I think it is a mistake to say ‘these are not Mansour’s men’ of Khaldoon in particular - that ignores the longstanding personal history between the two.
I have never thought that ignoring inconvenient facts was a good way of making your point - it has a tendency to be exposed just when you least want it to. The author of the article appears to take a different view.
