Andy Burnham had barely got his feet under his No10 desk when he telephoned Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, president of the United Arab Emirates.
According to the official record of their conversation, the Prime Minister, just days into his new job, ‘began by thanking His Highness for his country’s investment into Manchester and the incredible impact it has had on the city’.
Yet knowing the obliging former Manchester mayor as we do, it is possible to imagine he was more effusive in his gratitude than Downing Street’s pedestrian account of the call suggests.
After all it was the Emirati ruler’s brother, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the owner of Manchester City, who transformed not only the football club but the city centre itself, his millions helping to deliver the ‘Manchester miracle’ growth story that propelled Mr Burnham to the summit of British politics.
So perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised that he made that call to Sheikh Mohamed. Or that, as the Daily Mail has discovered, the UAE’s ambassador to the UK, Mansoor Abulhoul, visited Mr Burnham a fortnight ago, accompanied by none other than the man at the centre of what is fast becoming the biggest football scandal in history – Manchester City’s chairman, Khaldoon Al Mubarak.
Before stepping through the door of No10, for what was apparently a meeting with Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds, Mr Mubarak was seen sauntering nonchalantly along Downing Street. Coming just days before the club’s guilty verdicts were made public, the meeting reportedly discussed current and future UAE investments in Britain.
It wasn’t the PM’s first meeting with Abu Dhabi’s most powerful non-royal: they were pictured together at Manchester City’s Etihad Stadium in 2019.
Khaldoon Al Mubarak with Andy Burnham at Manchester City’s Etihad Stadium
With these links to the Emiratis in mind, it is perhaps little wonder that while football fans reacted with a mix of anger and disbelief at the scale of Manchester City’s cheating shame last week, our Prime Minister was supportive of the club’s owners. To widespread dismay, Mr Burnham said he would be ‘really concerned’ if they now decided to sell up, noting that it was ‘frustrating when people rush to judgment’.
Yet he wasn’t responding to a mere allegation. Following a lengthy investigation, three judges on an independent commission had found Manchester City’s owners guilty of systematically flouting Premier League rules for nearly a decade – a verdict the club is appealing.
What on earth, asked an incredulous nation, was Mr Burnham thinking? Reform Treasury spokesman Robert Jenrick said: ‘He seems more interested in Middle Eastern money than protecting the integrity of the game.’
Downing Street rowed back on his remarks, saying that ‘wherever wrongdoing is established, those responsible should face the appropriate consequences’.
But there is a growing feeling that his good relations with the Emiratis make him susceptible to pressure. Nick McGeehan, director of FairSquare, a sports and human rights research group, told the Daily Mail there was serious concern that the UAE ‘will use the relationship they have obviously developed with Andy Burnham’ to try to escape sanction.
He said: ‘I suspect they will go very hard on the UK Government, using a huge amount of political pressure in the hope that it will lean on the Premier League.’
Football fans have been making clear their views in online forums. If only a gutsy politician had stood up to all these dodgy foreign investors, is a common refrain. Actually there once was such a politician. His name? Andy Burnham. As sports minister in 2008, the lifelong Everton fan said he thought big-money takeovers risked the future of our national game. He added that tougher tests needed to be placed on new owners of teams to ensure they have the best interests of the club and community in their plans.
The Etihad Stadium… City’s owners have invested hundreds of millions on the site and surrounding areas in east Manchester
Nearly two decades on, he now appears to be on the side of super-rich investors. Last week was not the first time Mr Burnham has defended Manchester City’s owners. In a podcast interview in 2023, he was asked about Manchester council ‘selling swathes of land to the club’s owners’. Was this something that concerned him?
‘Go to east Manchester now and look at photographs of it 30 years ago,’ Mr Burnham told Pod Save The UK. ‘A large amount of the investment has come in from the owners of Manchester City.’
It is certainly true the club’s owners spent a lot of money on Manchester. There was the £450million Co-Op live venue, a £200million football facility and £300million for the Etihad Stadium’s north stand.
The club itself had been bought for £200million in 2008 by Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG), a private equity group owned by Sheikh Mansour.
The sale was timely for Manchester city council, which owns the Etihad, and which had its own money problems. Six years later the council collaborated with ADUG in a £1billion investment deal to build Manchester Life – a 6,000-home project in east Manchester. The terms of this arrangement were later found by academics at the University of Sheffield to be startlingly favourable for ADUG.
The leaseholds for land, property assets, rental and sales income rights, and ultimate control of the joint ventures, were all held by entities owned by ADUG, often via companies based in Jersey, which allowed the firms to benefit from negligible tax.
A council spokesman said: ‘Claims that some land was sold too cheaply to Manchester Life ignore the fact that there was zero market interest at the time of the sale, that the land is worth more now precisely because of Manchester Life’s investment.’
Nevertheless, others believe that the UAE’s investment in Manchester was part of a pattern.
‘The Premier League provides an incredible international advertising platform for Abu Dhabi’s state-owned entities,’ said Christopher Davidson, an expert on the UAE at Durham University. ‘And by investing in football, museums and hospitals, or even east Manchester, Abu Dhabi is winning hearts and minds.’
Others take an even more jaundiced view. Amnesty, the human rights group, once said the UAE’s ‘enormous investment’ in the club was ‘one of football’s most brazen attempts to “sportswash” a country’s deeply tarnished image’, adding that City’s success involved a ‘close relationship with a country that relies on exploited migrant labour and locks up peaceful critics’.
Not that Mr Burnham would be one, telling that 2023 podcast ‘those issues are for the Government to raise to a different level’.
Yet it should not be forgotten that there was a downside to Manchester’s property-led boom. Rents have gone up at a dizzying rate, amid a serious dearth of affordable housing. As mayor, this was once foremost among Mr Burnham’s concerns. He has greater worries now.
Even so, as the Man City scandal shows, his mayoralty is beginning to cast a shadow over his time in office – and it is one that shows no sign of fading any time soon.
