The Bay Area’s swift claim to the commanding heights of European football was completed when Manchester City lifted their first Champions League trophy in Istanbul on Saturday night. City’s owner, who attended a team game for the first time since 2010, was UAE royal Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan. His neighbor Qatar hosted this winter’s World Cup. The Saudi club have signed some of the best players in the world over the past few months, including Cristiano Ronaldo. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia effectively took control of golf’s PGA Tour the week City won.
Nowhere outside of Western Europe is this obsession with football’s shiniest baubles. Many fans lamented this – partly because of the mistreatment of women, immigrants, LGBT people and dissidents in the Gulf monarchy, and partly because they believed football should not be for sale. There are still attempts to challenge the dominance of the Gulf. The Premier League has referred City to an independent committee that will examine more than 100 allegations of breaches of financial rules – allegations the club denies. But football faces a dilemma. Money in the Gulf makes this top European competition more exciting than the rest.
See how the UAE fund has lifted Manchester City from joke status to football trendsetter. Every Man City fan over the age of 30 in Istanbul remembers those rough and tumble days. In the 1998-1999 season, the team had an embarrassing season in League One. Manchester City fans often see their club as the football offshoot of Monty Python. Waving inflatable plastic bananas, they sang surreally: “We’re not really here.”
The ancient city exists only in the form of song, dance and memory. On the pitch, the Emirates transformed the club. Their money buys players who win trophies, dispelling the old football cliché in the process: “You can’t buy a winning team.”
In fact, if you want a winning team, you have to buy it, usually with a transfer fee. The ugly truth of football economics is that the only way for Cinderella to become a princess is to be bought by a prince.
City follow oil-fueled Chelsea, which were bought by Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich in 2003. The two clubs between them have won 12 of the last 19 English titles. They are also the only European club to win the Champions League for the first time since 1999. Oil money allowed two upstarts to beat established powerhouses.
English football could have gone the other way and turned down Gulf money. It could have followed Germany’s “50+1 rule”, whereby club members must have a majority of voting rights. This prevents outsiders from taking over the club. This rule is often praised by football traditionalists. However, this means that German football has no oil-fueled upstarts. The result is that Bayern Munich, the highest-paid German club in history, has no real challengers and has won 11 consecutive league titles. The rule also means that other clubs from Europe’s largest economy have no hope of winning the Champions League, which three different English clubs have won in the past five seasons. Now another oil-fueled challenger may be emerging: Saudi-owned Newcastle United, which has just qualified for the Champions League.
Gulf money will likely continue to shape football for some time. Qatar’s Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad al-Thani is bidding to buy Manchester United from the Glazer family, while Saudi Arabia could bid to host the 2030 World Cup, perhaps jointly with Greece and Egypt.
The monarchy’s spending on football is often interpreted as a dodgy scheme to ‘sports shuffle’, or an ‘investment’ to diversify the economy away from oil and gas – although football clubs generally lose money, especially Consider that their salaries are paid by the Gulf royal family.
In fact, there’s a simpler explanation for why these guys got into football: it’s fun. This makes their friends and neighbors jealous. It’s an affordable hobby for billionaires. They face little competition from peers elsewhere. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, Abramovich and other Russian oligarchs have been driven out of the sport, very few Chinese are in, and most Americans who buy football want to profit from their clubs and are therefore reluctant Paying allows their teams to earn salaries to compete with the likes of the city.
European football then became a status quo between the monarchs of the Gulf, with Manchester City showing the potential to build a dynasty. Men’s coach Pep Guardiola has been in office since 2016 and built one of the greatest teams in football history, even if they didn’t show it in Istanbul. This season they won the Champions League, Premier League and FA Cup treble. They attack, they’re tactically innovative, and the current roster is young enough to remain dominant. Guardiola, exhausted from victory, warned Real Madrid, who have won the Champions League 14 times and Manchester City, on Sunday morning: “We are on our way. If they fall asleep, we will catch them.” It’s probably not a joke.