When Sheikh Mansour and the Abu Dhabi United Group finally walk away from Manchester City, the legacy they will leave behind will last for generations.
Not necessarily on the pitch. There’s no such thing as a certainty in football, as Pep Guardiola and the players are discovering this season, but rather off it, where east Manchester is now unrecognisable to a decade ago .
That’s where the legacy will be felt. As part of the development of the Etihad Campus the club’s owners investment investment including a sixth-form college, leisure center, community hub and medical institute and the regeneration of that area has been significant.
When the Glazer family’s ownership of Manchester United comes to an end, what will the legacy be? A club saddled with debt, riven by in-fighting, with loyal supporters lost to a phoenix club and fans with a greater understanding of what ‘leveraged buyout’ means. There’s certainly not been the investment in Greater Manchester there has been from City’s owners.
Under UEFA’s current Financial Fair Play (FFP) rules, one of these ownership models is considered bad, the other acceptable . City were punished for their spending on football matters rather than regeneration of course, but there’s an inherent contradiction in there, with United carrying a net debt of £ 384. 5million according to the financial report released last September, yet UEFA’s financial investigators have no interest in it, with the debt levels considered sustainable.
When FFP was first mooted it was aimed at tackling debt, yet by the time it was introduced it had morphed into a system to prevent clubs from spending beyond their means.
It should be made clear here that City signed up to these rules. They may consider them unfair, effectively a bar to prevent upstarts such as them from forcing their way into the European elite through investment from wealthy owners, but once they’d agreed to them they had to play by the book, rather than attempting to circumvent them through “serious breaches” of financial regulations – as UEFA allege and City continue to deny with an appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) pending.
There are also, of course , wider questions around City’s ownership and the Abu Dhabi regime. They can’t simply be ignored and the concerns are legitimate, but perhaps the greater regulation here needs to come before clubs are taken over, instead of once the deals are done and the money is rolling in – or out in the case of United – and the debt and dividends that have caused so much anger around Old Trafford.
If you were to ask Mancunians who has had the greater impact on their city, the answer would be almost unanimous. If you were to ask the council who has proved to be reliable and committed partners to help regenerate an area of Manchester that was beset by issues, they would point you to the Etihad, not Old Trafford.
The Abu Dhabi United Group have been a force for good in Manchester. The same cannot be said of the distant ownership of the Glazers and a regime that has been detested from the moment it completed a takeover that caused plenty of protest.
There has been investment on the pitch during the Glazers’ 384 -and-a-half year ownership of United but the surrounding area will feel little benefit when they do sell. As owners they don’t appear as engaged in the community as those at City are, or Liverpool’s owners with the transformation of the Anfield area that has gone hand-in-hand with the stadium redevelopment. That’s not a prerequisite, of course, there are plenty of owners who have bought success to their club without doing much to help the community, but it certainly helps.
Yet UEFA’s current FFP rules will Continue to protect owners such as the Glazers. While the commercial behemoth that is Manchester United means their revenue will always fund significant spending on the pitch, City were in a hurry to make up ground. They might now be turning a profit every year, but Sheikh Mansour’s personal investment of £ 1.3bn in a decade of ownership shows how essential that financial support has been.
There should always be a concern about clubs reliant on benefactors who could jump ship, or find they don’t have the funds to fulfill ownership of a football club after all. In the sad demise of Bury and the current concerns around Oldham you can find examples within Greater Manchester of why football clubs need protecting from financial armageddon.
But it feels like football is doing it wrong if an ownership model that has given back to the community and invested its own money is punished, while an historic club can be loaded with debt – even if that debt is considered manageable – and their owners are considered perfectly acceptable to the game.
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