No one understands better than Manchester City chairman Khaldoon al-Mubarak the tightrope Abu Dhabi walks as it tries to balance its relationship with Western Europe while weighing the complex geopolitics of the Gulf region. His father, Ambassador Khalifa Ahmed Abdul Aziz al-Mubarak, was eight years old when he left the family apartment in Paris for work on February 9, 1984, and was murdered in cold blood on the street by a Palestinian terrorist.
No one outside the Emirati royal family could be more committed to the project of establishing and maintaining Abu Dhabi as a significant and secure world power and a dominant member of the United Arab Emirates, a nation-state still only 55 years old. His paternal grandfather Ahmed Bin Abdulaziz Al Mubarak was the Chairman of Abu Dhabi’s Sharia Court Department and Senior Advisor to Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan. Founding President of the UAE. So Ahmed Bin Abdulaziz was the UAE’s James Madison (a founding father, not a Spurs player) as he drafted the new nation’s Islamic legal framework in the 1970s.
Khaldu’s father was killed by a group led by Abu Nidal, “the most dangerous and effective of all terrorist groups,” according to the CIA. [and] The best organizer of radical Palestinian terrorist groups before the emergence of Hamas.” In the phone call, Qatl argued that the UAE was “expelling Palestinian and Arab residents and associated with American imperialism.” In fact, they were accused in the west of being too soft, too radical for the Palestinians.
Both al-Mubarak’s grandfather and father have streets named after them in Abu Dhabi, and his father is honored as a state martyr. It’s fair to say that the city’s mayor respects the family tradition, where he first worked after graduating from Tufts University in Massachusetts as senior adviser to the UAE president and ruler of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed al-Nahya. Given his father’s martyrdom, the royal family is said to view al-Mubarak as an adopted son. According to a source in the Financial Times, al-Mubarak is “diplomatically in charge of the UK files as well as the Chinese files… and he is the main contact with the US administration” and enjoys diplomatic immunity in the UK. He seems to have made a rare misstep with his belligerent tone with Manchester City
According to the lawyer of “Manchester City”, Simon Cliff, it was al-Mubarak who dictated the aggressive confrontational position of “City” with the football authorities. Back in 2014, when City were fighting their first UEFA charge, according to leaked documents first published by Der Spiegel, Cliff wrote: “Khaldoon says he would rather spend £30m on the world’s top 50 lawyers and take them to court. [Uefa] rather than agree to a financial penalty for the next ten years.
He withdrew on the occasion, along with partner Paris Saint-Germain, with both clubs agreeing to a small fine and minor transfer restrictions with UEFA. Unusually, City continued to fight on after that, while Qatari-owned PSG accepted their punishment and agreed with UEFA – club president Nasser Al-Khelaifi became chairman of the European Club Association (now European Football Clubs) and the main rival of the breakaway team – and built a successful team to win Qatar’s first-ever Super League title. among observers who ignore human rights abuses. By fighting Siti to the bitter end, Al-Mubarak appears to have broken the ambassador’s cardinal rule: don’t embarrass your boss. If the city loses an appeal against the independent commission’s finding that they are guilty of multiple financial violations, Al-Mubara can be tasked with organizing the sale of the club.
“I’m sure Man City is too,” says Christopher Davidson, author of Abu Dhabi, Oil and Beyond. “Furthermore, some told me [in Abu Dhabi] that will be so. I can’t see any reason why they would stay there and try to rebuild the reputation after that. Now he embarrasses the royal family. I can’t think of any examples where things have gone wrong [for Abu Dhabi] and they just keep putting money into it. I think they will grant the appeal – nothing to lose by that – but once it’s done, it’s all about how to get out before the owners are declared unfit, which is a much worse outcome. There are some very smart people in Abu Dhabi who I believe would advise very strongly on a quiet retreat, because the longer they stay in the game, the more damaging it is and will remove any soft power Abu Dhabi may have.
In June, al-Mubarak said “you don’t sell these kinds of jewels” and said he had “only the intention to keep increasing it”. As for the wider threat to UK-Abu Dhabi relations, Davidson believes it has been overstated. “Some reports have perhaps portrayed Abu Dhabi as a bit of a monolithic. There are all large and growing sections of the Abu Dhabi state economy that are outside the purview of al-Mubarak. Some of Abu Dhabi’s biggest investments in the UK in recent years have been in renewable energy and wind farms in Scotland. The ruler’s lieutenant.”
Davidson also refers to International Holding Company (IHC), which has huge biotech, shipping, healthcare and retail investments in the UK, including Ivy restaurants, and is controlled by Sheikh Tahnun bin Zayed al-Nahyan, deputy ruler of Abu Dhabi and brother of the UAE president. “The withdrawal of these investments is unthinkable,” Davidson said.
In May this year, the UK signed a free trade deal with Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which he said could be worth £3.7bn a year to the UK economy. “The UAE was the main force behind this and it was a huge achievement for both sides, so there is no prospect of interfering with any of this,” says Davidson.
Al-Mubarak will probably emerge from this fiasco largely unblemished because City is a small part of his portfolio. “He can’t possibly know what’s going on everywhere in his empire,” Davidson says. “My gut feeling is that it’s the layers underneath it. It’s all about your legal counsel. I think the Qataris had very smart people for them. It was a case of poor advice to the senior Emirati involved, a misreading of UK politics and a misreading of the Premier League and its bigger picture as a rules-based structure.
“I think al-Mubarak is a product of poor advice given to him and ultimately Sheikh Mansour, including the ‘We won’t sell’ early last summer. He may be important to us in the UK but Man City was a peripheral project. [for Abu Dhabi].”