City are not sportswashing the UAE. MCFC are owned by Sheikh Mansour and he uses state functionaries to manage his club but City do not carry a UAE stamp or character. If the UAE so wished they could pump money into MCFC, and they could start using us a means of self-promotion but from what I have seen, at the very height of City's profile, when we were in the final of the Champions league, there was no UAE projection either domestically or internationally. The media have simply got it wrong. HRH Sheikh Mansour runs our club in exactly the same way as any other billionaire runs their football club, only he has a more adept system of managers in place.
I meet online with an international group based out of New York Abu Dhabi university. It is an international group but they organise the speakers and do all the administration and most of the people who attend are staff and their students. When the CL final was on I realised that there was no UAE national interest in Manchester City. They watched the game but didn't take it as their defeat or their team. I've been there. And their media do not talk about MCFC as the UAE team, it is the team of Sheikh Mansour.
People in the media, who are associated with other clubs, have used the UAE link to damage MCFC. If you read commentaries about MCFC now in the Guardian you will see us described as the UAE owned club. They do this repeatedly. It's deliberate. Sadly a number of Manchester City fans contribute to their site. If you do this you are frankly stupid. Do you not read their commentaries where City are now routinely described as state-owned football club?
What are the practical consequences for City fans? Probably none now. It was very important to the FFP prosecution because state aid was a central part of the case against us. If FFP dies, then the importance of a link, real or not, to the UAE dies. It wont stop reporters sympathetic to Utd and Liverpool from reporting us as a state owned football club but it has zero consequence beyond being annoying that a national media organisation should be so biased.