On Saturday night in Istanbul, the English soccer club Manchester City beat Italy’s Inter Milan for the most coveted trophy in club soccer, the U.E.F.A. Champions League Cup.
In the past two weeks, back in England, they have also won the world’s toughest league, the English Premiership, for the fifth time in the past six seasons, and the esteemed F.A. Cup, for the third time this century—that victory being all the sweeter for their having trounced their great cross-city rivals, Manchester United.
No wonder Manchester City, with the likes of the goalscoring prodigy Erling Haaland on board, are widely thought to be the best club-soccer team anywhere, possibly of all time.
A quarter of a century ago, City was struggling to play its way out of the third division of English soccer, slugging it out with teams so lowly that in one case, Macclesfield Town, the club no longer even exists.
The magic formula that has propelled them from dismal failure to one of the world’s most successful and richest clubs? The clue is on the jerseys they wear in Istanbul today: the logo of Etihad Airways, one of the two national airlines of the United Arab Emirates, the clutch of former British protectorates on the Arabian Peninsula.
Sport of Sheikhs
Manchester City, based in a handsome new stadium known as “the Etihad,” in humdrum East Manchester, has risen to these extraordinary heights thanks almost wholly to Gulf money. Sheikh Mansour, a member of the royal family of Abu Dhabi and deputy prime minister of the U.A.E., bought Manchester City in 2008 for $212 million and has since invested some $1.8 billion—enough to hire some of the greatest players on the planet, from Haaland to Belgium’s Kevin De Bruyne to their German captain, İlkay Gündoğan.
This injection of cash, talent, and glamour would on its own be a remarkable development in what only a generation or two ago was an earthy sport followed by mostly blue-collar working men in the poorer parts of grimy British cities. But far from being a one-off incident, Sheik Mansour’s takeover of Manchester City is part of a substantial movement of Arab money and, it might be said, style into English soccer, and to a lesser extent into other European countries.
Northeast of Manchester, in Newcastle upon Tyne, Newcastle United, a big-name-but-long-underachieving club, was controversially bought for $415 million in 2021 by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (P.I.F.), whose chairman is the renowned and not greatly lovable Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, the very “M.B.S.” who, the C.I.A. concluded, was complicit in the 2018 murder of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Through P.I.F., M.B.S. and the Saudi state now own 80 percent of Newcastle. And Newcastle’s results have dramatically improved. They finished fourth this past season in the Premier League, their best performance in decades.
The atmosphere at games is said to be frenetic, and traditionally fanatical Newcastle fans are so excited that, even in the face of human-rights concerns about Saudi Arabia, they have been known to wave Saudi flags at games.
Meanwhile, Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad Al Thani, a banker from Qatar—which just as controversially, given its human-rights record, hosted the last World Cup this past December—has eyes on buying Manchester United. United may or may not be sold by the American Glazer family and is not doing particularly well these days. (The Glazers also own the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.) But Manchester United is still the most coveted brand in world soccer; the sheikh recently raised his bid to some $6 billion, but the Glazers are said to want closer to $7 billion.
The Qatari state, it should be noted, did a Manchester City–type takeover of the French club Paris Saint-Germain in 2011, which has seen similar success in the French league, bringing even bigger star players to Paris than Mansour brought to Manchester. P.S.G. has Neymar and Kylian Mbappé on its roster, and had Lionel Messi until he was signed by Inter Miami earlier this week.
Not only have Arab investors bought less spectacularly into European soccer clubs, but Saudi Arabia has also found an alternative way of making a splash in the world’s most popular—and lucrative—sport. They have started importing star players, mostly in the latter part of their career, to Saudi teams as lavishly paid show ponies.
Saudi Arabia’s P.I.F., which bought Newcastle, began the process immediately after the World Cup by hiring the Portuguese legend Cristiano Ronaldo to play for the Al-Nassr club on a contract worth $225 million over three years. This past week, the French striker Karim Benzema joined another Saudi club, Al-Ittihad, from Real Madrid. The fund is reported to be negotiating to bring over other superstar players, and was undoubtedly disappointed to hear that Messi, who captained Argentina to their World Cup triumph in Qatar last year, was snatched up by Miami before they could bring him in.
The question arises of whether this rush into soccer by official funds and individual investors in wealthy Gulf states is little more than a testosterone-fueled arm-wrestling contest between countries which, though they are all in an organization called the Gulf Cooperation Council—not to mention U.S. allies—also hate one another with some energy.
Their disputes seem to be in the nature of family squabbles, with no actual shots fired, but they are more than trivial: diplomatic relations between Qatar and a bloc of other Arab nations were severed between 2017 and 2021, and even Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E., supposedly friends with common geopolitical aims, exist in a state of near perma-quarrel.
The great fault line in the Arab world is between states aligned with the West—Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. the most prominent among them—and those that support the Western-aligned states’ nemesis, Iran, or at least don’t oppose it as much as they might.
Qatar—which is one of the 10 richest countries on the planet despite having a population of just three million people—is the most significant among these states. In June 2017, Qatar was accused by Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E., among others, of supporting terrorism. The mutual antagonism, although currently lessening, still ebbs and flows.
Another point of conflict between these neighbors is the massively lethal and largely forgotten civil war in Yemen. The U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia accuse the Iranians of backing rebel forces there, and Qatar of being in league with the Iranians.
Is this rush into soccer just a testosterone-fueled arm-wrestling contest between countries that hate one another?
So, yes, it’s complicated. But are these soccer-crazy nations at some level waging proxy wars using footballers as their cavalry? No Gulf potentate exactly says as much, but Yemen, Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., and Qatar are all adept at using proxies to fight real shooting wars on their behalf. In the civil turmoil in Libya, Qatar supports the U.N.-recognized government, which embraces Islamist militias, while the U.A.E. backs the major rebel army.
The Gulf states’ actions in the soccer-sphere suggest, if not an overtly belligerent confrontation, a passive-aggressive battle over prestige and honor. Exhibit A might be Paris Saint-Germain’s Qatari owners’ apparent fury just last month when Lionel Messi left training for a brief visit to Saudi Arabia. He was fined $1.7 million and is expected to leave P.S.G. this month. Perhaps he was felt to have let down his teammates, but it’s more likely a friendly trip to the club owners’ enemy was the tipping point.
It’s easy to overstate, even to a cartoonish extent, the macho posturings between unfeasibly wealthy men (always, always men) in both the Near East and the world of soccer. But it’s probably wise not to underestimate it either.
While conventional wisdom in soccer holds that owning a football club is one of the best ways to lose money, there’s a chance, too, that in reality soccer is not a bad way for Arab business to adjust to an ever closer post-oil world.
Sheikh Mansour’s Manchester City takeover, for example, can be seen as a rather canny financial move. Following his $2 billion investment, the club is now said to be worth over $4 billion. According to a report last year by the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank, “the value of the thirty-two most prominent European soccer clubs increased by 9 percent in 2019, and operating revenues in the European soccer market have grown by 65 percent in only eight years.” The think tank argued that Arab investors have been ahead of the curve by getting so deeply involved in the sport.
And it’s not just soccer, either. Earlier this week, a merger was announced between the P.G.A. Tour and LIV Golf, which is backed by P.I.F.. The merger puts an end to a two-year-long fight between the two, in which the P.G.A. Tour accused LIV of using “astronomical sums of money … to sportswash the recent history of Saudi atrocities.”
Which brings us to another explanation for the Gulf states’ push into soccer: important and valuable P.R. for the Arab, and by extension the Muslim, world. In England, those Newcastle fans waving Saudi flags—and in some cases wearing items of Saudi costume—may be few in number, but their sentiment is significant. And unsurprisingly, Sheikh Mansour, the savior of Manchester City, is a huge hero in Manchester.
In nearby Liverpool, meanwhile, where Liverpool Football Club is American- rather than Arab-owned (Liverpool is owned by Fenway Sports Group, a division of RedBird Capital Partners, which is an investor in Air Mail), there is a hugely loved and excellent Egyptian striker, Mohamed Salah. Salah is a devout Muslim as well as an activist for women’s rights in the Muslim world, and his presence on the team has led, according to research by Stanford University’s Immigration Policy Lab, to a marked decrease in Islamophobia and hate crimes in Liverpool.
Even the crowd chants at Liverpool matches reflect this heartening outbreak of diversity. “If he scores another few, then I’ll be Muslim too,” runs one such. Another: “Mohamed Salah, a gift from Allah. He’s always scoring, it’s almost boring.”
Based in London and New York, AIR MAIL’s tech columnist, Jonathan Margolis, spent more than two decades as a technology writer at the Financial Times. He is also the author of A Brief History of Tomorrow, a book on the history of futurology