2 hours ago
5
How would you feel if the owner of the football club you support was implicated, even as those implications are repeatedly denied, in famine, ethnic cleansing and the deaths of 1,500 men, women and children?
Compare this with the more familiar list of bad things football club owners do, the real sack‑the‑board stuff. Failure to buy a striker. Inadequate Showing Of Ambition. The hiring and/or firing of David Moyes. Mike Ashley was pretty annoying. He had shops full of quilted coats hung really high up close to the ceiling.
Somehow, allegations of complicity in a genocidal war do feel like another level. So what’s the response? Boycott games? Protest? Investigate? Not give a toss? This might seem like a hypothetical. But it is literally right there in front of us, and wearing the colours of Manchester City. Welcome to football in the year 2025, a place of wild cognitive dissonance. Why aren’t we screaming about this? This week I went to two football matches in two days, both complex and compromised occasions, in effect a regional bloodshed double-header, only one of which seems to have elicited any public concern.
The other one was Manchester City against Borussia Dortmund at the Etihad Stadium on Wednesday night. Let us be clear on our terms here. Manchester City are owned by the state-run offices of Abu Dhabi. There have been tedious attempts to deny this is the case. This is a waste of air. The United Arab Emirates is a centralised inherited monarchy, a place where no power is non-state power. The vice-president of the UAE, Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, is also the owner of Manchester City football club.
Sheikh Mansour is thus implicated directly in a letter addressed this week to the British government by the MP for Islington North, Jeremy Corbyn. In this letter Corbyn repeats a conclusion already drawn by the UN and the US Department of State, that the UAE (and thereby the owner of Manchester City) is providing resources and support for ethnically targeted mass killings in Sudan so vicious they can be seen from space.
The UN has spoken of mass rape, ethnic massacres and the threat of widespread starvation. Piles of dead bodies and patches of blood are visible on satellite pictures. There are reports of the summary execution of 500 people in a maternity hospital.
This is not just another distant connection, a corporate war‑laundering scheme, a bank that owns a fund. It is literally the same people. Club owner. Government. Football match. Bodies. The choice is simple. You either care or you don’t.
So we’ll go with … don’t, then. On Wednesday night in Manchester, no one seemed to even know any of this. No “Free Sudan” flags. No mass protests. People in half‑and‑half scarves milled happily. As fireworks popped overhead, stewards offered the chance to have your photo taken with a huge Viking-style Guy Fawkes effigy, which turned out on inspection to be just a cutout of Erling Haaland’s head.
The only visible banner was an advert for Pancho’s Award Winning Burritos, counterpoint to the one inside the stadium that reads Manchester Thanks You Sheikh Mansour (yes, that Mansour). Otherwise, nothing, zilch. Which is a legitimate choice. It isn’t the job of football supporters to fix these problems. You may look at it and not see a problem. But why is English football and its governance OK with this? Why are the people who are correctly moved, justifiably horrified, by the simultaneous bloodshed in Gaza OK with this?
It is worth being clear on what is happening in Sudan, described in an editorial in Le Monde this week as “a descent into hell”. Four years ago the shift to post-Bashir democracy was derailed by a coup led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan. Forces opposed to Burhan launched a counteroffensive. So began a heavily militarised conflict fuelled by exports of natural resources, notably gold.
This became, it is alleged, a proxy war for regional powers. Burhan is said to have received support from Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The UAE is reported to be backing the Rapid Support Forces of Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, which it flatly denies. Either way, someone has been delivering massive quantities of weapons, and enabling what the US government described in January as an RSF-led “genocide” in Darfur. Recent evidence has emerged of massacres and mass rapes enacted by General Hamdan’s forces in the besieged El Fasher. More than 12 million people have been displaced. This is now the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis.
The UAE denies arming any side. But as reported by Tariq Panja in the New York Times, the US has intercepted regular phone calls between General Hamdan and Emirati leaders, including Sheikh Mansour. Jeffrey Feltman, previously US envoy to the Horn of Africa, has said: “We always understood that, behind the scenes on Sudan, lay Mansour.” This is, repeat, the owner of Manchester City. It seems at the very least worthy of some kind of concern.
And again, this is not a distant link. It is right there. Mansour has had reported meetings with General Hamdan and also, for balance, Ramzan Kadyrov. He’s also sailing around in a yacht called Blue and putting City scarves around the necks of world leaders. Is that what football is for? Is it enough simply to take the money and the glory in return. This should be an outrage. Why isn’t it? We certainly have the capacity for outrage.
The second game I went to his week was Aston Villa against Maccabi Tel Aviv. For all the talk of Nights of Shame this was a largely peaceful protest. The police did their job. Banning the Maccabi fans may have been a supra-football choice – come on, we’re not children; there’s a war going on – but it helped retain order.
Otherwise this was surely the most protested about single event in British sporting history. This is a good thing. It is obviously right to be concerned. I wrote in these pages a few weeks ago that Israel should not be taking part in international sport at all while blood is being spilled in Gaza, a standard that should be applied to anyone carrying out extreme acts of war.
after newsletter promotion
It is human to care about what is happening and to apply whatever pressure is available to stop it. This is how our society should work when people, for want of a better phrase, actually give a toss.
And while you don’t have to agree with this, or see any relation to sport, if you care about one of these things and not the other, it is worth asking why.
Why does no one care that City are owned by Sheikh Mansour’s Abu Dhabi, that an area of Manchester has been literally rebranded as “Etihad”. Imagine the rage if Israel bought a Premier League club. It wouldn’t last five minutes.
As it stands, no one is banning Abu Dhabi from anything. It’s a home of fun. Frankie Boyle, for example, is consistently critical of Israel’s military actions, which is good and fine, but happy also to perform at something called the Laughter Factory in Dubai only this year because, well who knows?
Looking at this you start to suspect the only way for the people of Sudan to get any kind of leverage would be for Israel to start bombing them. Perhaps Israel should start hiring its services to beleaguered populations everywhere. Is your bloodshed failing to do numbers? Hire the IDF. Everyone hates us.
So why does no one care? Or rather, why does everyone care about one side of this picture? It should be noted there were some Sudanese protests before the Manchester City Women game last week, but not the organised groups seen protesting against other things. And nothing on Wednesday, no encampments, no banners, no graffiti, and zero mentions of this connection still in the mainstream media. There are some obvious reasons. First, ignorance. People just don’t make the connection, or know this thing is happening. It’s not presented on a daily basis. You can ignore it, or see it as someone else’s problem.
The other explanation is that there is a heavily codified set of beliefs out there that only faces one way. A lot of people simply despise Israel. Gravity points that way. The hive mind is powerful. So this is the issue. These massacres over here.
The other key reason is our old friend sportswashing. This may be an overdone term, but blimey it works, and the UAE is exceptionally good at it. Social media is flooded with influencers pumping out its aspirational visuals. Rio Ferdinand is currently trilling his penny whistle for the everything-works lifestyle, which also happens to be a repressive statehood. The UAE is hugely present in British life as an ally and a sugar daddy.
And yes, we know this works because the original sportswasher was the British empire in a time you’d hope not to repeat, firing up the colonial control system around its codified Victorian games. But what are we supposed to do about it now? Who knows? This world is largely set. Opinions are fixed in pre-existing shapes. But for a start, we could actually care. The idea of a fit and proper person to own these community assets needs to be seen in the context of a ship that has long since sailed over the horizon. Very obviously governments, or government arms, should not be allowed to own sports clubs, something that has always been painfully obvious.
Mainly, though, it is necessary to see this all with open eyes; to reject whatever your entrenched position might be; and to do what George Orwell described as trying to tell the truth.
