Metropolis’s administration knew precisely the place to look. One after one other, firms linked to Abu Dhabi and the United Arab Emirates signed on as Metropolis sponsors. The nationwide flag provider Etihad Airways would quickly see its identify emblazoned throughout Metropolis sky-blue shirts. The stadium the place it performed its house video games would quickly be renamed for the corporate, too. Etisalat, a telecommunications firm that’s majority owned by the Emirati authorities, joined up, too, as would a number of others.
The offers helped finance the crew’s sudden rise — Metropolis gained the Premier League title on the ultimate day of the 2012 season, after which added one other two years later — however they didn’t cowl all the crew’s spending, and that caught the attention of soccer’s monetary regulators. In 2014, Manchester Metropolis and one other Gulf-backed membership with large ambitions, the Qatar-owned Paris St.-Germain, agreed to a settlement with UEFA after being discovered to have been in breach of the governing physique’s monetary rules.
A multimillion-dollar tremendous was imposed, an consequence palatable to Metropolis, however the chief investigator within the case was so angered by the settlement that he stop on the day it was introduced. Metropolis, in the meantime, went proper on spending: on gamers, on coaches and on attorneys.
In 2018, months after Manchester Metropolis’s newest star signing, Guardiola, clinched the primary of his 4 league titles on the membership, the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel revealed a four-part sequence that it mentioned uncovered the foundations underpinning Metropolis’s rise.
Citing scores of leaked paperwork and emails, Der Spiegel rolled out one revelation after one other. In a single article, it reported that one in all Metropolis’s former managers had reportedly been paid greater than his annual wage — nearly $2 million — for a four-day consultancy contract with one other soccer crew, one primarily based in Abu Dhabi and in addition owned by Sheikh Mansour. In one other, it mentioned that Etihad, Metropolis’s predominant sponsor, was paying solely a fraction of a sponsorship deal mentioned to be price £67.5 million ($81 million) per season. A overwhelming majority of the cash, the article mentioned, was lined by different entities linked to Metropolis’s homeowners or the federal government of the U.A.E.
“We mustn’t present the companion complement whether it is going exterior the membership,” Metropolis’s head of finance, Andrew Widdowson, wrote in a single leaked e-mail. Manchester Metropolis has constantly refused to touch upon the content material of the leaks as a result of it was “criminally obtained.”