Pep Guardiola and his Manchester City squad are one game and one win away from sporting immortality.
Ilkay Gundogan's Wembley brace secured a 2-1 victory over rivals Manchester United in the FA Cup final, making City double winners after they retained the Premier League crown in the face of a strong Arsenal challenge.
Now, only Internazionale stand in the way of them becoming just the second English club to win a league, cup and European Cup treble, following United's famous 1998/99 exploits under Sir Alex Ferguson.
City are an awesome force on the field and are strong favourites heading into Saturday's Champions League final at Istanbul's Ataturk Olympic Stadium. However, the celebration of their feats has not been universal, with questions over the ethics of their ownership becoming wrapped up with charges of financial impropriety from UEFA and the Premier League, along with concerns that five titles in six years have damaged the competitiveness upon which the English top flight likes to market itself.
There are plenty of competing and contradictory factors at play in the heavily polarised debate about City. As they attempt to make history, it feels like as good a time as any to sift through them.
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Who owns Man City?
Technically, Manchester City are not owned by a state. But if you're getting into a lather over this part of the conversation then it's probably best to bow out now.
Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan acquired City via his Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG), a private investment and development company, in 2008. As part of the club's Abu Dhabi-financed expansion, which includes satellite clubs in New York, Melbourne, and beyond, the City Football Group was established in 2013.
The CFG is Manchester City's ownership group and oversees a network that has now grown to 13 clubs across five continents. As of July 2021, the CFG has been owned by Newton Investment and Development LLC, a company registered in Abu Dhabi and wholly owned by Mansour. US private equity firm Silver Lake have a significant shareholding of 18.1%, while China Media Capital is also a minority CFG shareholder.
These arrangements give City a greater relative distance from their affiliated state than you will find in Paris Saint-Germain or Newcastle United's relationships with QSI (of Qatar) and PIF (of Saudi Arabia). However, Mansour's fortune is derived from the Abu Dhabi Royal family. His brother, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, is the President of the United Arab Emirates, where Mansour is Deputy Prime Minister.
City chairman Khaldoon Al-Mubarak also holds UAE and Abu Dhabi government portfolios and is the managing director and CEO of Abu Dhabi's sovereign investor Mubadala. City board member Simon Pearce is also Special Advisor to the Chairman of the Executive Affairs Authority of Abu Dhabi, demonstrating another close link between the club and the upper echelons of government.
Criticism of this ownership model tends to be two-fold. In its 2022 report on the UAE, Amnesty International wrote:
The United Arab Emirates put into effect new laws that significantly curtail freedom of expression and assembly. The authorities extended the arbitrary detention of tens of mass trial victims past the end of their prison terms, and subjected one human rights defender and one dissident to extended ill-treatment. The government renewed its stance against recognizing the rights of refugees.
Human rights concerns regarding the Emirate tie in with claims of sportswashing around City’s ownership and purported attempts to launder Abu Dhabi and the UAE's reputation via a popular and successful sports team. In 2021, Human Rights Watch said:
United Arab Emirates (UAE) authorities continued to invest in a “soft power” strategy aimed at painting the country as a progressive, tolerant, and rights-respecting nation, yet the UAE’s intolerance of criticism was reflected in the continued unjust imprisonment of leading human rights activist Ahmed Mansoor and others.
The other primary focus of criticism is the legitimacy or otherwise of multi-million dollar sponsorship deals City have secured from commercial partnerships with Abu Dhabi companies such as Etihad and Etisalat. These arrangements have become a lightning rod over recent years, as City have been plunged into battle with the football authorities.
Man City Premier League charges
In February 2023, the Premier League referred Manchester City to an independent commission for over 100 alleged breaches of its competition rules.
Cries of "115 charges" have become a zinging, cast-iron argument-ender in the eyes of many an internet wag, but a closer look at the Premier League statement laying out City's charges reveals that there are actually 130.
The initially bungled announcement, which needed to be amended due to the charges spanning several seasons and some of the alleged offences having different codes in different annual rulebooks, might account for the confusion that means "115 charges" is now canon and a shorthand City put-down alongside "oil money", "plastic club" and the like.
Racking up charges that run into three figures is the sort of headline-grabbing feat that no one at City should relish and it was surreal to see Premier League chief executive Richard Masters handing out winners medals in May to a club his organisation has accused of serial cheating.
The reality is that City will be tried on four major allegations covered by multiple sub-sections of the Premier League rulebook from 2009 to 2018. These are:
- Providing inaccurate financial information, in particular with respect to its revenue (including sponsorship revenue), related parties and operating costs between 2009/10 and 2017/18 (50 alleged breaches).
- Not providing accurate information on manager and player remuneration between 2009/10 and 2015/16 (20 alleged breaches).
- Failure to comply with UEFA’s Club Licensing and Financial Fair Play regulations between 2013/14 and 2017/18 (5 alleged breaches)
- Premier League profitability and sustainability rules between 2015/16 and 2017/18 (25 alleged breaches)
The final 30 charges relate to claims City failed to cooperate adequately with the Premier League's investigation, something that will sound familiar to anyone who followed the club's seismic case with UEFA that came to a head in 2020.
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Man City UEFA ban: What happened?
The Premier League and UEFA launched investigations into City in the wake of November 2018 articles published by Der Spiegel, which drew upon the Football Leaks documents acquired by Portuguese whistleblower Rui Pinto.
In February 2020, UEFA announced City were banned from its competitions for two seasons for "serious breaches" of FFP rules. City appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) and, in July of that year, the ban was overturned.
CAS found that City "did not disguise equity funding as sponsorship contributions" and that the alleged breaches of FFP rules were "either not established or time-barred".
The time-barring element has been seized upon by many to suggest that City merely got off on a technicality, with the "not established" part of the equation not trumpeted as frequently, but both were absolutely relevant to the outcome.
For example, the allegation that sponsorship funds from telecommunications company Etisalat were disguised equity funding from Mansour or ADUG was found to be time-barred by the CAS panel under UEFA's own rules. The same claims against City's main sponsor, Etihad Airways, were not all time-barred but the majority of the panel found there was "not sufficient evidence to conclude that MCFC committed the violations alleged by UEFA". The Football Leaks emails were accepted as admissible evidence by CAS.
City were still fined €10million for the failure to cooperate with UEFA's investigation, behaviour that CAS noted should be "strongly condemned".
There is no time-barring element in Premier League rules or the option of recourse to CAS.
That was not the first time City were punished by European football's governing body. In 2014, City reached a settlement with UEFA in relation to FFP breaches. The club were fined €60m, €40m of which was subsequently refunded after complying with sanctions that included a reduced Champions League squad size and a spending cap for the 2014/15 season.
City reluctantly accepted the UEFA sanctions, which were among the first to be issued during the era of the governing body's new FFP rules. "In normal circumstances the club would wish to pursue its case and present its position through every avenue of recourse," City said. "However, our decision to do so must be balanced against the practical realities for our fans, for our partners and in the interests of the commercial operations of the club."
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Man City transfer fees, wages: Do they spend the most?
City supporters might like to think all this will go away if the Premier League case falls in their club's favour.
The response to the partial exoneration by CAS shows this probably will not happen. When it comes to reputational damage, the die is cast. For many, if City are punished, they are bang to rights; if they are cleared, they'll have got away with something thanks to technicalities and expensive lawyers.
The Premier League case is expected to last for anywhere between two to four years, meaning it has plenty of time to frame another part of the discourse around Guardiola's team: namely, that their financial might, irrespective of its legitimacy, means it is impossible to compete with City.
From day one of the takeover on September 1, 2008, when City broke the British transfer record by signing Robinho for £32.5m from Real Madrid, spending has been a huge part of the club's turbocharged growth.
They broke the record again in 2021 when Jack Grealish became Britain's first £100m footballer. Then and now, those were sums the majority of clubs could only dream of, but is it fair to say City habitually blow their rivals out of the water financially?
The span of Guardiola's tenure seems a fair measurement for this. Kevin De Bruyne is the only first-team player remaining from Manuel Pellegrini's reign, so this is the time in which a formidable squad has been almost entirely compiled.
Since 2016/17, City's net spend — admittedly, a fairly blunt tool but useful enough for these purposes — is a touch higher than Arsenal and comfortably clear of Liverpool but comes in shy of Manchester United and Chelsea over the same period.
Premier League 'big six' net spend since 2016/17
| Club | Net spend since 2016/17 |
| Man United | £778.74m (€903.65m/$968.07m) |
| Chelsea | £694.47m (€805.86m/$863.31m) |
| Man City | £574.54m (€666.69m/$714.21m) |
| Arsenal | £549.99m (€638.21m/$683.70m) |
| Tottenham | £406.48m (€471.68m/$505.30m) |
| Liverpool | £230.83m (€267.85m/$286.94m) |
*data via transfermarkt.com
Okay, but spending a bit less is all well and good when you get Erling Haaland on a knockdown release clause but pay gargantuan wages along with a stack of agent fees, right?
Figures released by the Football Association show City did spend more than any Premier League team on fees to intermediaries in the 12 months up to January 31, 2023 – the Haaland bounty pushing their spending up to £51.56m.
However, the most recent Premier League wage figures for 2022/23, published by FBref via Capology, show City come in second behind neighbours United — again one of a small, big-spending elite rather than a singularly dominant financial power like PSG in Ligue 1 or Bayern Munich in the Bundesliga.
Premier League 'big six' wage bills 2022/23
| Club | Annual wage spend |
| Man United | £228.51m (€263.05m/$288.34m) |
| Man City | £194.74m (€224.17m/$245.72m) |
| Chelsea | £184.86m (€212.80m/$233.28m) |
| Liverpool | £161.98m (€186.46m/$204.39m) |
| Tottenham | £109.33m (€125.85m/$137.95m) |
| Arsenal | £99.32m (€114.33m/$125.32m) |
It is also worth highlighting that any spending by City is made possible by the club's position of ever-increasing financial power. They came top of the Deloitte Money League — an annual list of the top revenue-generating clubs in world football — for the second time in a row in 2023. Deloitte put City's revenues at €731m, above Real Madrid (€713.8m) and Liverpool (€701.7m) — a notable achievement given they only broke into the top five in 2015/16. "This growth has been fuelled by an increase in commercial revenue (up €65m to €373m in 2021/22), which is a new Premier League record," Deloitte said.
Forbes also highlighted City's impressive revenue figures in its list of the world's most valuable soccer teams, published on May 31, 2023. Despite being fifth in the valuation list at just under $5bn, City were acknowledged as having the highest revenues ($815m) and operating income ($175m) of any team in the top 30. A week later, the Brand Finance Football 50 Report named City as the world's most valuable football club brand, citing "a decade of dominance on the pitch and the highest revenue of any club in the report" as key factors.
City's rapid ascension into the top revenue-generating club in the world might have raised some eyebrows, but it certainly accounts for their ability to make decisive investment in the playing squad when Guardiola calls for it.
While we're on the subject, the idea of City having "two world-class players for every position" is another common fallacy. They finished the most recent domestic season with a squad of 16 senior outfield players, with the likes of breakout youngster Rico Lewis, Cole Palmer and Sergio Gomez making up the numbers elsewhere.
Shea Charles was handed a debut off the bench during the final weekend game at Brentford, with the 19-year-old Northern Ireland international becoming the 24th player used by Guardiola this season — the lowest number across the Premier League's 20 clubs.
Man City used the fewest players overall in the Premier League this season (24) but made the third most changes to their starting XI's (106).
— Harvey Downes (@HarveyDownes92) May 28, 2023
Quality not quantity.
Massive summer for Arsenal this. pic.twitter.com/F4bmpXAnen
This is, to a large extent, by design. Guardiola prefers to work with smaller squads to ensure his complex tactical ideas are fully absorbed and to guard against players not feeling involved and becoming unhappy. He appeared to have left himself dangerously short when a disgruntled Joao Cancelo was packed off on loan to Bayern Munich in January but City have thrived since, with creative solutions at full-back offsetting the fact Kyle Walker is their only natural in that position.
In terms of depth of quality, few teams can compare. If the Champions League final is going awry, Guardiola will likely be able to throw on Phil Foden, Riyad Mahrez and Julian Alvarez.
But it's wide of the mark to say City are inevitably successful because they spend loads more than their Premier League rivals and have a massive squad of world-class players all raking in more wages than anyone else.
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The genius of Guardiola: Do Man City have the world's best manager?
Maybe, just maybe, this guy is the difference.
When Guardiola arrived in English football, having dominated in Spain and Germany with Barcelona and Bayern — albeit infamously failing to win the Champions League with the latter — there was some scepticism over how his positional-play doctrines would work.
Heavy defeats midway through a maiden trophy-less campaign at Leicester City and Everton, along with that infamous "what is tackles?" comment, left a few people wondering what all the fuss was about.
Since then, Guardiola has laid waste to the record books. City obliterated the competition with 100 points on their way to the title in 2017/18, the season they won the first of four consecutive Carabao Cups.
In 2018/19, the Blues were embroiled in the first of two titanic tussles with Jurgen Klopp's brilliant Liverpool side and ended with an unprecedented domestic treble. In 2020/21, Guardiola recalibrated to the peculiar demands of lockdown football better than anybody else and his strikerless City took the title back from Merseyside.
To complete the three-peat this time around, he went from false nines to the most real, terrifying No.0 imaginable. Haaland had a thirst for record-breaking in common with his manager.
City still had to be reassembled to make space for the goalscoring machine. The general expectation was that they would have to cede Guardiola's cherished control and embrace a little more chaos. But first Lewis and then the imperious John Stones provided another slant on the manager's non-negotiable of dominating possession in a hybrid defender/midfielder position.
You can't move for fluid forward lines or inverted full-backs nowadays. It's no exaggeration to say that bold appointments such as Marcelo Bielsa to Leeds United, or Roberto De Zerbi to Brighton & Hove Albion, would not have been made without Guardiola showing that experimental idealists can thrive in England's no-nonsense football culture.
City's financial power means they would probably have won some titles as they did under Pellegrini and Roberto Mancini. They are part of a small, strong elite in England and Europe that spells problems for the long-term competitive balance of a sport without effective spending and wage caps.
But winning like this, in a relentless, revolutionary style against clubs like United, Chelsea, Bayern Munich and Real Madrid, clubs who can be considered their equals in terms of resources? It really is tough to imagine it happening in this fashion with anyone but Guardiola and just as difficult to foresee it continuing once his time in Manchester comes to an end.
He has the benefit of a working environment built to his specifications by old Barca allies Ferran Soriano and Txiki Begiristain, although being very organised, having a plan and carrying it out is not something to rank among sport's most heinous crimes. Guardiola has proven himself to be worth that effort and financial outlay several times over.
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Will Man City lose their titles?
The City manager seems acutely aware of his place in history and how it might judge him.
He has proven beyond dispute that he is a football visionary, perhaps the greatest coach of elite players the game has ever seen. Aside from Haaland, who of his City signings arrived as a fully-formed superstar? His is a triumph of coaching, ideas and imparting both expertly as much as it is money.
However, those Premier League charges will loom over Istanbul and other sunkissed days to come, ready to rain asterisks upon all that the Catalan has built. Yes, the bulk of the most serious allegations relate to a period before his tenure, but would Guardiola even be at City without their pre-2016 success? Whether or not that was achieved within rules that City and all other Premier League clubs signed up to still matters.
If City are guilty, will all their titles be expunged? The Premier League has more or less any punishment at its fingertips that it sees fit to mete out. So, theoretically, yes.
However, the sporting precedent for financial offences is a heavy points deduction or the nuclear option of relegation. No matter what advantage a team might gain from financial impropriety, it does not put the ball in the net or save a penalty. "What we won, we won it on the pitch," has become a sort of mantra for Guardiola since the Premier League charges hit.
The Calciopoli scandal in Italy, which saw Juventus stripped of the 2004/05 and 2005/06 Serie A titles, related to attempts to influence the refereeing of games. There's a degree of separation in financial charges that means it is hard to argue that they directly affect results in the same way, however much such offences might stack the deck unfairly.
In City's case, think more of clubs who enter administration and start seasons on minus points totals or Premiership rugby union giants Saracens, whose punishment for salary cap breaches ultimately led to relegation. For City's part, they stridently believe it will not come to that and in the strength of their own case.
Inter were the beneficiaries of Juve's shocking downfall in 2006 as they were awarded the Scudetto. If they lose on Saturday, do not expect the Nerazzurri to be retrospectively crowned European champions.
Should Manchester City win in Istanbul, history will record it as their first Champions League triumph, a second European trophy after the 1970 Cup Winners' Cup and a treble to stand alongside Manchester United's. How should you judge them? I suspect you've already made up your mind.
