We are not very good at this sportwashing thing are we?

On holiday in Tenerife last year ear-wigged an argument between .a Littlewoods fan and a Blue,listen to the anti city rant,every point the City fan said “are you able to stand up in a court and say this”.Stumped didn’t, know what to say,finally the City guy said” you must have bad breath”why said Liverpool red,”cause you are talking through your arse”.The roar from around the bar at this put down stunned the Kopite,and out he trounced.City guy then between a few free pints went on to blow the Kopites rant to pieces.20 /30 mins later he sat down,to much applause.Well I never knew that was the general talk,Why don’t we hear this from the media.Owned was the reply.
 
Just in response to Damo, fully aligned with you.

it doesn’t matter what is right and wrong to the media anymore, it matters who gets there first. This is to fulfill the demand for content. That demand is driven by us.
 
pavelsrnicek said:
That’s a cracking bit of well researched writing @Damocles.

One thing I was wondering if you came across Khaldoon’s status in the UAE? Nicholas McGeehan suggested that as Khaldoon was such a significant figure in UAE commercial circles and important to Mohamed bin Zayed, that his involvement with City confirmed, as far as McGeehan was concerned, that the City were de facto UAE state controlled.
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McGeehan is correct that Khaldoon is considered one of the top executives in the country but the conclusions that he has drawn from that are spurious. Sheikh Mansour and Khaldoon have obviously been well acquainted with each other for years and there's no reason that asking a well respected executive that you work with already on several projects to Chair your latest venture is in any way untowards.

Khaldoon's status as "MBZs guy" from McGeehan comes from several sources but mainly due to Wikileaks. In the Wikileaks of the US diplomatic cables, Khaldoon is often seen in major geopolitical meetings with MBZ which in turn gave McGeehan the idea that he is super important to him. It's not a stupid idea but it's a guess. Khaldoon was the CEO of Mubadala which is the Abu Dhabi Sovereign Wealth Fund and as such has to negotiate with delegates from other countries pretty much all day long. In particularly, the US were trying to court his attention when market uncertainty and political pressures met around the election of Barak Obama. In addition to this, he is the leader of the Executive Affairs Authority which is a group that advises MBZ in geopolitical and economic matters. This is where his strong links with the Crown Prince come in. However, he's had strong links with every other power player in the Al-Nahyan family too so to single him out as the MBZ boy is a bit of an assumption. He couldn't have reached these heights without MBZs blessing but he also couldn't have without Sheikh Mansour's blessing.

There's a famous piece of history in Abu Dhabi regarding the Chiefdom of the Bani Yas tribe that the Al-Nahyan come from and rule. Essentially, there was a merry go round of rulers about 100 years back because all of the sons of Zayed (an old leader, not Mansour's father) started killing each other for the claim to the "throne". Due to this Zayed (Mansour's father/UAE founder)'s mother demanded a pact between all of her sons that no Al Nahyan would ever kill a sibling for the throne. This stopped the bloodshed and forced everybody to get in line behind the leader and was a major reason why Zayed was not on the throne much earlier. He eventually, and reluctantly, took the throne from his brother in a bloodless coup after the British gave him little choice. This part of the Al Nahyan history and culture is pretty important as there's an idea that no matter what you do, you absolutely never go against your own brothers. This seems to be an extremely strict idea in the family as far as outsiders can tell as the story of the mother forcing the pact on her sons is held in reverance.

I would argue that Khaldoon is more powerful than Sheikh Mansour in the UAE in real terms rather than ceremonial terms. He spends his life bouncing between talking to actual power brokers rather than politicians. He has lots of recorded conversations with the US Treasury Department, the Indian finance Ministry, the Pakistan PMs office, etc. He is the central figure in the intersection between the Abu Dhabi wealth as CEO of Mubadala and Abu Dhabi political power as the Chair of the EAA. And if you run both the money and the politics then you're a pretty important guy. In fact I'd argue that Khaldoon is probably more powerful than Sheikh Khalifa who is the "leader" of the UAE (whereas MBZ is considered the actual leader and to have autonomy in all matters). He sits at the intersection of all of the power in the Emirate and is a global political and economic player second perhaps only to Daniel Levy. He's from a very well to do family in the Emirate but his talent seems to have elevated him rather than nepotism. Of course having the right name was important but it's not the only thing, it is being able to use that name to your advantage with outsiders. For what it's worth, Khaldoon has a CBE from the Queen a few years back which they don't hand out to nobodies.

I can see McGeehan's argument but to suggest that City are state owned because Sheikh Mansour asked a long term friend to act as a chairman is too much of a stretch for me. It's not evidence, it's just something that looks like evidence.
 
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Damocles said:
McGeehan is correct that Khaldoon is considered one of the top executives in the country but the conclusions that he has drawn from that are spurious. Sheikh Mansour and Khaldoon have obviously been well acquainted with each other for years and there's no reason that asking a well respected executive that you work with already on several projects to Chair your latest venture is in any way untowards.

Khaldoon's status as "MBZs guy" from McGeehan comes from several sources but mainly due to Wikileaks. In the Wikileaks of the US diplomatic cables, Khaldoon is often seen in major geopolitical meetings with MBZ which in turn gave McGeehan the idea that he is super important to him. It's not a stupid idea but it's a guess. Khaldoon was the CEO of Mubadala which is the Abu Dhabi Sovereign Wealth Fund and as such has to negotiate with delegates from other countries pretty much all day long. In particularly, the US were trying to court his attention when market uncertainty and political pressures met around the election of Barak Obama. In addition to this, he is the leader of the Executive Affairs Authority which is a group that advises MBZ in geopolitical and economic matters. This is where his strong links with the Crown Prince come in. However, he's had strong links with every other power player in the Al-Nahyan family too so to single him out as the MBZ boy is a bit of an assumption.

I would argue that Khaldoon is more powerful than Sheikh Mansour in the UAE in real terms rather than ceremonial terms. He spends his life bouncing between talking to actual power brokers rather than politicians. He has lots of recorded conversations with the US Treasury Department, the Indian finance Ministry, the Pakistan PMs office, etc. He is the central figure in the intersection between the Abu Dhabi wealth as CEO of Mubadala and Abu Dhabi political power as the Chair of the EAA. And if you run both the money and the politics then you're a pretty important guy. In fact I'd argue that Khaldoon is probably more powerful than Sheikh Khalifa who is the "leader" of the UAE (whereas MBZ is considered the actual leader and to have autonomy in all matters). He sits at the intersection of all of the power in the Emirate and is a global political and economic player second perhaps only to Daniel Levy. He's from a very well to do family in the Emirate but his talent seems to have elevated him rather than nepotism. Of course having the right name was important but it's not the only thing, it is being able to use that name to your advantage with outsiders. For what it's worth, Khaldoon has a CBE from the Queen a few years back which they don't hand out to nobodies.

I can see McGeehan's argument but to suggest that City are state owned because Sheikh Mansour asked a long term friend to act as a chairman is too much of a stretch for me. It's not evidence, it's just something that looks like evidence.
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Thanks for the response.

It did feel like there was a lot of reaching in McGeehan’s article. One of the main issues was his assumption that as Simon Pearce and Khaldoon al Mubarak are close to MBZ therefore MBZ must be in charge of City.
 
Sheikh Mansour is a bit of a mystery still for me, not in terms of power but in terms of credentials and acumen. We've got some info (such as Barclays), but it's all a bit limited for me. I haven't put in the hours to research this though I must admit.

But to have convinced a guy like Khaldoon to effectively the City project must mean that Sheikh Mansour is a seriously well respected person and businessman.
 
mccity said:
Sheikh Mansour is a bit of a mystery still for me, not in terms of power but in terms of credentials and acumen. We've got some info (such as Barclays), but it's all a bit limited for me. I haven't put in the hours to research this though I must admit.

But to have convinced a guy like Khaldoon to effectively the City project must mean that Sheikh Mansour is a seriously well respected person and businessman.
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The point that the English media simply does not report is that Sheikh Mansour has made a fortune out of his investments in Manchester City, the Manchester area itself, and the UK generally. He is in it to make profits and to move his portfolio away from dependency on oil revenues which are running out. The false "sportswashing" concept was fabricated by a small clique of activists to help publicise their workers' rights campaigns and some idiots in the UK press swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.
The irony of all this is that the focus on so-called "sportswashing" by our commercial rivals and enemies in the media has acted as a smokescreen which has allowed our owners to develop a unique business model which has made us one of the most dominant commercial operations in global sports. Khaldoon himself has likened the CFG operation to the Walt Disney corporation business model.
 
mccity said:
Sheikh Mansour is a bit of a mystery still for me, not in terms of power but in terms of credentials and acumen. We've got some info (such as Barclays), but it's all a bit limited for me. I haven't put in the hours to research this though I must admit.
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We know a bit about his early life. We sort of have to look at his Dad really, Sheikh Zayed who founded the UAE and put it on the road to modernity and his value. As you would expect, the man is held in such reverence that separating the myth and legend of Zayed is somewhat hard to come by but we know a bit about his pre-oil life thanks to a famous British explorer called Wilfred Thesiger who met him extensively and built up a great relationship with him.

Zayed was a brilliant diplomat, of that there really can't be any debate, but he was also a strong tribal leader. Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia have been in conflict over a specific region/border for decades and it was Zayed who when Abu Dhabi still had nothing and the Saudis were both rich and backed by the Americans, refused to take a bribe to sell the land and stood up against them. He was politically sharp but importantly he valued the traditional Bedouin lifestyle and he forced his sons despite their fabulous wealth to adhere to these principles. MBZ for example was essentially dumped with a false passport in Morocco as a young man and stripped of any wealth. He made his living as working as a waiter in a crappy restaurant on minimum wage with no familial support in order for him to live "a real life" at the behest of his father, in a one bedroom apartment he had to pay for himself and his life was tough. Sheikh Mansour had a similar experience in how he was expected to travel in the desert and learn the ways of the tribal elders who survived for generations using that way of life. Living in poverty was a key aspect of how he fathered his children.

Mansour also studied in the United States for a period of time. He was considered a fairly shy boy and a poor student as reports go. But he's one of the "six sons", sons of the favoured wife of Zayed, so he was appointed to some important roles in the Emirate. He always retained a large interest in outside ventures such as sports and was huge into both football, horse racing and camel racing before he bought City. Reading around the material for him, he seems ..I'm not going to say dull but perhaps "average" would be a fair description. His diplomatic skills seem passable and he doesn't seem to cause anybody any trouble or controversy. He's more of a Western educated technocrat who appears to be a liberal in as much as anyone can be termed as such in Abu Dhabi. Most of his interest are based in conservation, nature, and sports.
 
Damocles said:
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 6 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.
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Excellent and very interesting post Damo. In regards to you penultimate paragraph, unfortunately the club allowed the transition from "owned by Sheikh Mansour" to "owned by Abu Dhabi" and it is impossible to reverse that now.
 
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