Man City is one of the victims of the change that social media has made to society in recent years. Or perhaps it never changed but has just become much more popularised? I don't know if I'm looking back on the world with nostalgia but things used to be different.
The big problem now is that everything has to be black and white. Society has become child-like in how it has become allergic to complexity in any argument, any opinion, any situation. All we want to know now is who are the goodies and who are baddies and we cheer along those lines. This extends to football, politics, news, celebrity, even history and science. What is right and what is wrong? That's the only thing that is necessary for most people and I genuinely believe that the world is significantly less rational and much more tribalistic in opinion. Now it's not even offensive to be on the opposing side of an argument; it has extended to the idea that even people who don't share the exact same argument as you are now people to be derided.
A little while back, some months ago, I was arguing with someone about either Qatar or the UAE. I don't recall the exact argument but I do recall that I said something along the lines of that they "execute gay people"; it had to be pointed out to me that actually that isn't true at all. I knew this and I don't know why I said the opposite and it bothered me and it still bothers me now. The prevailing narratives are repeated so often that even as someone who feels like they're a fairly rational type, it gets swept up into your consciousness and you just knee jerk believe things because you've heard them repeated by everyone on social media.
This is how I feel the sportswashing thing has developed. People believe this because they've heard it and not because they've examined it. Let me clear though - 99% of people who talk about sportswashing have no idea what it is, don't care about any human rights issues in the Arabian world and are using it as a pointless exercise in moral grandstanding. What TotallyMartial or KopEnd88 think about the current UAE geopolitical goals could be written in large print on the back of a stamp yet they'll be the loudest voices. How many times do these people talk about "your Saudi owners" or crap like this? Much more than they don't. If you cannot even get the country right in a discussion then I don't believe your opinion is worth listening to when talking about the goals of that country.
But as with most issues, there's a complexity around the ownership of City that them and us completely ignore because we can't be arsed researching, thinking or trying to ascertain facts. We want this not to be a sportswashing project most of the time for the same reason that those people do - because it will make us feel better about our favourite sports team or club.
We also have other problems in this area and that's namely the agenda problem. Everybody who writes anything has an agenda in what they're writing, this post included. Unfortunately as with most issues, almost nobody cares about humans that don't look like them or live in their back yard. This isn't an English thing or a white European thing, it's a human thing. We don't REALLY care that people are starving in some nations or that workers are being exploited in others but we care when we're about to send our own troops into other nations. We'll march in the streets by the millions for that. There's nothing inherently wrong with this behaviour because people can only process so much and the world is full of information that you need to be outraged about in every field due to the way that media's funding model has changed over the last 20 years and how the switch to digital has made quality less important than quantity and engagement. Outrage fatigue, I think the term is.
The problem then is that activists need to do something to get attention to their work. Whether that's tearing down a statue or linking Manchester City to the entire UAE as a country in order to get eyeballs and engagement on their activism which will lead to greater notoriety, more interviews, more articles and more funding. I've given it out a bunch of times to Nicholas McGeehan on Twitter who wrote the "Men Behind Manchester City" blog post which was in my opinion a very cynical attempt to conflate City with UAE workers rights issues in order to sell a documentary to Netflix. He had written on these issues before but never really gained much traction; nobody cared, really. However once he could link it to something people do care about such as football then immediately it became the most famous and widely read thing that he had ever produced. It circulated on football social media like a wildfire because it fit two preconceived notions that everybody has; the first being that Arabia is the land of Ali Baba and turban wearing rich people who own slaves and the second that Manchester City are an immoral enterprise. Unfortunately something that I don't think McGeehan really grasped at the time is how this would also be spread around far right and white nationalist websites as further propaganda against Islamic countries and Arabs. But still, I understood why he did it even if his actions were cynical. He wanted to shed a light on the exploitation of workers and in a society full of outrage fatigue, he had to penetrate that apathy and present a very simple argument that others could easily understand and if that meant "stretching the truth" about the ownership of City then so be it. It was a calculated decision in my opinion that in his eyes was probably seen as worth it. The worker's rights issues are a huge problem in the UAE and they need to be tackled politically and by activism like McGeehan does every day. Do we REALLY care that some people link our club to these events if ultimately it creates a better situation on the ground? I don't know, I think I'm okay with it if the ends do justify the means. Does the situation on the ground merit the calling of the UAE "a slave state"? No. Not by any useful measure of the definition of slavery.
Over the last year or so I've made a conscious effort to read more about the UAE and specifically the Nahyan family. Where it comes from, the history of it, the various characters involved, etc. The power structures and the decision making of the UAE is pretty dense and hard to unravel as all Governments are. We live in a highly regulated liberal democracy and we argue about whether Boris Johnson or his advisors or some wing of his Party is really running the country, so the expectations that we're going to work out who does what and where in the UAE and get a real "chain of command" below the President is somewhat fanciful. Is Mansour the 2nd most powerful man or the 4th? Or the 8th? Is his role as one of the two Deputy PMs in the Cabinet more ceremonial or does he Chair the meetings? I've always believed that his post as Minister of Presidential Affairs is his actual power base because whoever controls access to the top man is really the most powerful man in a cabinet. But that's an assumption based on history and there's no real evidence for this. It's a better and more educated assumption than KopEnd88 will make but I couldn't exactly prove it in a courtroom. Sheikh Mansour is the Vice Chairman of Mubadala which is the centre of the spiders web that is the Abu Dhabi investment vehicles. That seems pretty relevant in term of his power but then what does he actually do there? The man was a C+ student most of his academic life, is his job literally to be an Al-Nahyan or is there something more?
Another problem is that due to the way that Sheikh Mansour's father Zayed acted, it's almost impossible to know what's ceremonial and what's not. Sheikh Zayed Al-Nahyan was essentially put on the throne by the British because his brother was an overly conservative tyrant who refused to let his people abandon the somewhat nomadic Bedouin lifestyle and kept all of the oil sales to himself, to hand out to whoever he liked, whenever he liked. This pissed off the tribes and Zayed was a keen diplomat who was respected by the British and the other tribal chiefs and the people alike so he went in charge. But when he did this, he started to bring together the disparate tribes into one single entity which became the UAE. And in doing so there was a ton of tribal rivalries and politics and diplomacy to be done about who did what, what tribe got what, which family got what, etc. This may all sound like ancient history but it was in the 1960s. The founder of the whole nation of the UAE died in 2004. Many of the people he negotiated with in the first place are still alive and still remember the original deals about who does what. So it adds another layer of complexity to whether Sheikh Mansour is important because he's Sheikh Mansour or because he's Mansour Al-Nahyan, son of Zayed, who negotiated that his son should take this role and somebody else's son should take that role.
I have one thing that I want to add here when talking about how important Sheikh Mansour is or isn't because it fits into Zayed's life. Zayed grew up before the oil came in and he lived in a small tribal fort in the desert. Desert life is rough, it's hot and let's say that sand dunes are probably not that entertaining the seven thousandth time that you've looked at them. One of the ways that the tribes in the region used to entertain themselves was by hunting - specifically falconry. In fact the legend of finding the island of Abu Dhabi had its mythology in chasing down a gazelle across a waterway. But the bird that they prized the most was called the Houbara Bustard. It's not easy to describe the political and social significance of the Houbara Bustard in the Arab world because there's not really an analogy that I can think of in the West. It is a bird that was hunted for generations by Arabs in the Gulf region and was always the most prized but it also has an almost religious significance to them as well. In the West we read of how they are hunted as an "aphrodisiac" which is a vast and almost offensive over simplification; the Houbara Bustard was the greatest hunt for a falcon due to the way it moved and its stamina and agility and as such, the tribal chiefs built a strange-to-our-eyes level of respect for the thing. They'd spend weeks chasing a single one in the burning desert heat even at the cost of their own camels. This obviously created a significant environmental pressure and it almost went extinct so Zayed setup a conservation effort and agreed hunting limits with many other chiefs. Nowadays, Royals of the UAE may only hunt this bird on licence despite it being a prestigious and traditional ceremony for them to undertake. There's only 3 Royals who have been chosen to be allowed hunt this bird and Sheikh Mansour isn't one of them. That's not brilliant evidence and maybe the guy just doesn't like hunting but the Houbara Bustard hunt there is certainly a symbol of leadership and history and tradition so any top official worth their salt would probably be desperate to go. This is more significant to me than it might first appear.
Sheikh Mansour has around 5 brothers in the way that we would think of the word "brother". In a polygamous society, that word takes on a different meaning than it might do here, and around 20 brothers when different family units are taken into account. One of his brothers is the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi. Another of his brothers most important position is running the Abu Dhabi Jet Ski team. Where he sits on that line of powerful->not powerful seems to be closer to the powerful end but he's certainly not the top of that. And cousins? Bloody hell. You could probably call half of the UAE a cousin to Mansour through some family connections - remember that up until 50 years ago, the region was a group of tribes who used to intermarry their sons and daughters in order to maintain diplomatic ties. In fact Sheikh Mansour's Mum's brother was a hugely influential figure in the region until he died and he held almost no offices of real note yet was a confidant to Zayed and a protector to his sister and her kids which included MBZ. Yet he was named as the Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces. But he didn't seem to actually ever do anything in that role. Trying to untie any of this into straight lines is almost impossible.
Here's what we can say for absolute certain. Sheikh Mansour is not the ruler of Abu Dhabi and he is not the ruler of the UAE. He is one of the more powerful people in that country but he isn't at the zenith nor is it likely that he would be trusted to run what is the most visible of all of the companies connected to the UAE if they were extremely image conscious. Forget research around the takeover, which will only point you in one direction, but given Sheikh Mansour's status in the UAE as far as it can be determined, I'm extremely skeptical on the idea that he is a representative of his Government rather than a kid who grew up in a British "protectorate" in a desert surrounded by British people who he played football with and just thought that he'd quite like to own a football team to entertain himself. Sheikh Mansour doesn't seem to actually be in charge of anything; all of his major roles in the UAE are to sit and be an Al-Nahyan rather than to take an active role which he seems to have at City if statements and interviews from the board and players are true. The one major role that he does have that carries responsibility is to be the official greeter for people his actually powerful brother is going to meet. He has a ton of important sounding titles but when you look further into them, he's always sat on boards of 20 people. Why choose this guy to head the singularly most important enterprise on the image of your entire nation, your entire family, your entire region and indeed your entire race to some degree? Why not the leaders in MBZ or Sheikh Khalifa who I'm sure would love the extra glory? If you wanted it to be out of the leadership then why not promote Sheikh Omar from Chief Jetskier to Owner of Manchester City? Jetski jabs aside, he has actual experience in sports and sports promotion so would be the prime candidate to sit on the top of City after his work on the Abu Dhabi GP and the Yacht races. If this is a whole of UAE effort then why not the Al-Nuaimi family? They're heads of another Emirate but they're sports mad and one of the sons runs the UAE FA so already has experience and connections with FIFA. Seems a prime candidate to me.
There's many, many aspects of the sportswashing idea. Some of them seem to have merit. Most of them have absolutely no merit. Some of them are inbetween where "why would they do this" is a debatable point. All in though, there's just no evidence to suggest anywhere that this is a thing but it is presented by much of the media as a factual statement. In my opinion the only way that this will change is City become much more litigious on several issues that are taken as fact - the idea that we're owned by a state when we are provably not; the idea that we are a sportswashing enterprise when there is zero evidence to support this outside wild conspiracy and the basics don't even make sense; and the idea that we are using "dodgy sponsorships" in order to inflate our revenue which not only is there no evidence for, but we proved in court that it was not the case. These are slurs against the club that become facts in the mind of most fans and unless we do something to change this perception closer to reality then it will always continue.
It's ironic that in a conversation about sportswashing, most City fans are frustrated by the lack of action by the Communications Departments to protect our club and indeed our fans from the hounds in the press.
