"The Biggest Scandal There's Ever Been": Dissecting the Disgrace of Manchester City

Sovereign wealth funds. Prime ministers. Fake money. Fake excuses. Fake people? If you thought the Clippers were bad, wait until you comprehend the depths of cheating that have thrown the Premier League into chaos. The Athletic's Adam Crafton explains how "sham" deals, sportswashing and one hacker's email led to a devastating verdict — and why the aftermath of Man City's "festering stain" could extend beyond historic punishments... to world history. • Subscribe to The Athletic https://theathletic.onelink.me/eNRy/ptfo • Subscribe to The Athletic FC Podcast https://pod.link/1488521447 • Plus: Submit your confidential tips to Pablo https://www.pablo.show/tips (Pablo Torre Finds Out is brought to you by Apple Card.) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Pablo Torre?

  Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out, brought to you by Apple Card. I am Pablo Torre and today, we're gonna find out what this sound is.

• 0:08Speaker 01

  I hope the integrity and the identity of the club can somehow remain untouched with all the money that's coming in.

• 0:15Pablo Torre?

  Right after this.

• 0:19Speaker 02

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• 2:05Pablo Torre?

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• 2:29Pablo Torre?

  I've been trying to figure out how to start an episode like this, and every time I wanna try and translate this for American fans. Adam Crafton, and thank you for being here, by the way.

• 2:39Speaker 04

  Thank you for having me.

• 2:40Pablo Torre?

  I realize that I'm almost asking you, like, so how about that nuclear bomb? How would you explain how big a deal that is to people?

• 2:48Speaker 04

  Hmm. Yeah, I mean, I feel like even people who don't really know about soccer have heard that Man City have been cheating. The bomb's kinda gone off in Europe, but it's on its way.

• 3:02Speaker 05

  Manchester City has been found guilty of 114 of the 115 charges related to breaches of the Premier League's financial regulations.

• 3:13Speaker 06

  Manchester City arranged sham contracts which misrepresented the true agreement between the parties with a number of its commercial partners, as well as relying on sham agreements to artificially inflate the club's revenues and reduce its costs.

• 3:32Pablo Torre?

  And the person who broke the news of the guilty verdict, as he explained to us, was your colleague, Adam. The Athletic's David Orinstein.

• 3:39Speaker 07

  Athletic colleague Matt Slater, fantastic journalist in his own right, sent a message into our Slack group saying a contact of his had got in touch to say, "I think it's time to light the beacons," and that the verdict had been delivered to the parties. So Manchester City, the Premier League, and that this Premier League season was going to be chaos. And when I found out the extent of the judgment that Manchester City had been found guilty on all but one of the charges, it was like jaw-dropping.

• 4:23Speaker 07

  Adrenaline is rushing, but not out of happiness or exhilaration, more out of, "What the hell is going on here? Oh my goodness." This is a seismic, mind-blowing moment for Manchester City, for the Premier League, for English, British, European, and world football. Actually, for sport as a whole. Possibly the biggest scandal there's ever been.

• 4:53Speaker 04

  I'm trying to think of something that's comparable. Think of the most dominant team you know in your favorite sport over a 10-year period, almost 15-year period, and imagine that they've just been called cheats.

• 5:06Pablo Torre?

  What if the Los Angeles Clippers were the Los Angeles Lakers?

• 5:10Speaker 04

  Exactly. What if the Clippers won everything?

• 5:13Pablo Torre?

  What if the Clippers, what if their plan worked?

• 5:15Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 5:15Pablo Torre?

  What if it worked better than anyone had ever dreamed? And also ended up embroiling into this story the Prime Minister, sovereign wealth funds, and of course, a raft of fake money, fake excuses, as well as potentially fake people? It's a bit of a smorgasbord of corruption.

• 5:36Speaker 04

  We should say at the top, may say it a few times, Man City have appealed these Premier League independent commission findings by three barristers in the UK. And we will see where that goes. But for now, they have been found guilty, and that's the way that they should be described.

• 5:54Pablo Torre?

  How did you react when you first heard the guilty verdict? Just as a human processing the news that had been sort of in the offing for years?

• 6:02Speaker 04

  I wasn't surprised that they were guilty because I think, as we will get into in this episode, it was quite obvious, just by kind of the vibes of it, in the sense of over the last kind of 15 years, the idea that Manchester City would have commercial income significantly higher than many leading Premier League clubs during that period didn't make sense. And I say that because Man City, if you go back 15 years, weren't the globally known brand that they are now. I mean, if you were to say that now with Haaland and Pep, et cetera, it would make more sense, but 15 years ago, it didn't make sense.

• 6:43Speaker 04

  So it was, I think it was clear to many people who were looking at it that some of this certainly didn't add up. What is maybe a surprise is that the Premier League actually had the guts, the courage, to follow through on it and convict them as roundly and as comprehensively, as devastatingly as they have done.

• 7:05Pablo Torre?

  The reaction from soccer fans, from, AKA, from the world? I don't think I was surprised by the intensity, but I was awed by it, if that makes sense to you?

• 7:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, but you've got to remember, this is a team that's been winning. And if they're winning, it means other teams, your team, have been losing, and your team have been missing out. And that, I think, has bred for a long time, a lot of frustration. So for example, Liverpool under Jürgen Klopp, you know, I think most people will know that they were a brilliant team, but it turns out they were competing in an unfair playing field for the best part of, you know, nine years. And even in that time, they still managed to win the Premier League title once. But there was a couple of times where they got an incredible points return, but they still couldn't get past this kind of monolith of Man City. And Arsenal had similar experiences.

• 8:02Speaker 04

  Manchester United, less close, but finished second a few times. And Tottenham, for example, finished fifth, I think, three times between 2011, 2016. And Man City were in that top four. So Tottenham, by missing out on that, missed out on a huge amount of potential revenue, huge opportunities that could have allowed them to buy better players, give better contracts. Even a team like FA Cup final, I think 2011, Man City played against Stoke City. Not a kind of globally known team, but they made it to an FA Cup final. They lose that FA Cup final against a team that had been competing in an unfair playing field.

• 8:44Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 8:45Speaker 04

  That might be a kind of once-in-a-lifetime thing for those fans. I mean, imagine going with your dad, your grandfather, your mom to that game, and you have lost that, you have missed that experience because you are competing in an unfair playing field. So these are all the kind of sliding doors moments.

• 9:02Pablo Torre?

  My brother was walking through New York City the other day, and he walked by a guy we've both interviewed, the mayor, Zoran Mamdani, who is a diehard Arsenal fan. And my brother, who has been radicalized into a Tottenham maniac, tells him that, you know, he's taunting. Again, "The rival, I support Tottenham with all my heart," is what he tells Zoran. And Zoran reportedly replies, "At least you don't financially cheat." And they both shared a hearty laugh, the laugh that has been echoing across the internet.

• 9:35Speaker 04

  Zoran, I think he tweeted 114.

• 9:38Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 9:38Speaker 04

  He literally just tweeted the numbers 114, which I imagine to many New Yorkers would have been very confusing.

• 9:44Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 9:45Speaker 04

  As in, what in a...

• 9:46Pablo Torre?

  What stage of Sharia law is this? Many wondered.

• 10:07Pablo Torre?

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• 11:22Speaker 03

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• 11:47Pablo Torre?

  So, wait, you're from Manchester?

• 11:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, from Manchester originally. So all my family are still there. My nephews are, not sure how this happened, but they are Manchester City fans. So, yeah, I was getting messages from my younger nephew saying, Adam, can you get rid of the charges? I was like, it's not in my, it's not in my power, sadly.

• 12:08Pablo Torre?

  But I want to venture a guess as to how it was that they became Man City fans.

• 12:12Speaker 04

  Well, I think they, they fell in love with this team. This team of Kevin De Bruyne, Sergio Aguero, David Silva, Erling Haaland, Pep Guardiola, the kind of super coach, you know, almost undisputedly, really, the outstanding coach of the past two decades with Barcelona, the kind of coach that brought through Messi, and then at Manchester City. They had been a pretty calamitous club. When Manchester United, under Alex Ferguson, were winning the treble in 1999, Man City were in the third, fourth division of English football, and they were mocked, and they were kind of ripe for an ownership to come along to take them on a journey that they, that they, you know, lapped up.

• 12:57Pablo Torre?

  So I promise I will stop comparing everything to the Clippers, but you are actually reminding me that before City became the equivalent of one of the most dominant teams that you might recall from, I don't know, like various Lakers TV series and documentary projects, they were kind of the Clippers. The little brother, Save City, didn't have as much, were made fun of relentlessly, until something happened that changed the fortunes of the team, literally.

• 13:27Speaker 04

  And the something is the Deputy Prime Minister, Vice President of the UAE, Sheikh Mansour Bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  City's newfound fortunes are a billion miles away from their rather more modest past. They would never have had this before, so it's all new to them. Dennis Stewart hit on a point about saying, I hope the integrity and the identity of the club can somehow remain untouched with, with all the money that's coming in.

• 13:51Speaker 04

  Sheikh Mansour comes along in 2008, and again, City at this point, they, they were at risk of kind of going out of business. They had a, a former Thai prime minister was owning the club previously, so it had been a mess there for a while. And it was very clear, you know, in how they were spending immediately, that these guys meant business, that these guys had incredible resources, and that Abu Dhabi viewed this, or at least the guy who, who owned them from Abu Dhabi, viewed this as a very, very serious project for him, that incredible amount of resources were going to be devoted to not just winning, but dominating English soccer. And it's interesting because they didn't buy it, you know, in legal terms as the UAE, right?

• 14:36Speaker 04

  They didn't buy it as Abu Dhabi. What they bought it through was an investment vehicle. So over the years, many journalists would have got phone calls from Man City saying, you shouldn't describe us as state-owned, right? This was essentially framed as, this is a private man's hobby. It just happened to be that the private man is the Deputy Prime Minister and Vice President.

• 14:56Pablo Torre?

  And the private company that he is buying this through is called?

• 15:01Speaker 04

  Abu Dhabi United Group.

• 15:02Pablo Torre?

  Which is very different from Abu Dhabi.

• 15:04Speaker 04

  That's kind of the legality of it, right? The paperwork. In vibes, and if you were to ask the layperson who follows soccer, who owns Man City, the UAE became synonymous, indistinguishable, really, from Man City. You know, the stadium is sponsored by Etihad Airlines, the jersey sponsored by Etihad Airways, the academy campus building, Etihad Airways. They kind of started to take on this slew of, of Abu Dhabi sponsors. There would be, I think there was a bank, there was property companies, Etisalat, Visit Abu Dhabi, you know, they weren't subtle about this, right?

• 15:42Pablo Torre?

  The point in, in some meaningful regard of why Abu Dhabi would want its arrayed, identifiably Abu Dhabi businesses to be all around English soccer is because all sorts of people now become aware of them.

• 16:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I think, you know, what did people know Abu Dhabi as before? I mean, I'm almost not old enough, really, to have a real framing of that, but it was kind of a desert place, they have huge amount of the world's oil, and it depends who you speak to. I mean, some people will say it was all about kind of changing perceptions away from human rights abuses. Other people will say, and I think there's merit in both these arguments, that it was about diversifying the economy as well, and diversifying what they are seen as and how they are.

• 16:30Pablo Torre?

  And that could be a yes and kind of dynamic.

• 16:32Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 16:33Pablo Torre?

  Sports washing, as long described, as well as this could be good for business.

• 16:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. And, you know, you, the oil's not going to last forever, so you have to have more, you have to have, you have to use that, those resources that you currently have to get investments all over the world. So, I mean, Mubadala, the UAE Sovereign Wealth Fund, the Abu Dhabi Sovereign Wealth Fund, which is headed up by Khalid Al Mubarak, the Man City chairman, you know, that has got billions and billions of investments all over our country, in the United States, all over the UK.

• 17:07Pablo Torre?

  Oh, this is, this is the entity I just got to point out as a side note, invested $10 billion with Mark Walter, the wuds and soon-to-be former owner of the Lakers, literally.

• 17:18Speaker 04

  You could not extricate Mubadala from the world's economy.

• 17:21Pablo Torre?

  Not anymore.

• 17:23Speaker 04

  Not, not, not anymore, not really for, for a long, long time.

• 17:26Pablo Torre?

  I just want to quote Khalid Al Mubarak, who's, of course, the chairman of Man City, working incredibly closely with Sheikh Mansour. This is what Al Mubarak said to The Guardian, quote, "There is almost a personification of the club with the values we hold as Abu Dhabi, as Sheikh Mansour. Bizarre, loyalty, commitment, discipline, long-term thinking, respect, appreciation of history. We are acknowledging that how we are handling this project is telling a lot to the world about how we are. This is showing the world the true essence of who Abu Dhabi is and what Abu Dhabi is about," end quote.

• 18:02Speaker 04

  And Man City, they wanted it, and for a long time it was, to actually be an exemplar of what we can do when we invest and when we run something the right way, and look at how clinically brilliant Man City were, and how that can be, you know, as Al Mubarak says, a personification of our values. The problem is, they've now been called a bunch of cheats, so that if you take him at his words, that then becomes a reflection of Abu Dhabi as well.

• 18:31Pablo Torre?

  Well, the way that people who have visited the Emirates have described Abu Dhabi to me is, it's, it's sort of distinguishing trait is that it has wanted to be the center of commerce, the financial center of the UAE, which takes us along this timeline to 2018, when there is an email that arrives in the inbox of a senior official at Man City.

• 18:55Speaker 04

  Essentially, it's an email, and it appears to be from the European soccer governing body, UEFA, seemingly saying like, here's a link to the latest compliance report, financial report. City employee doesn't sort of, you know, now you would probably check the from, and then you'd click, or maybe many people still wouldn't.

• 19:13Pablo Torre?

  I'd like to think I would.

• 19:14Speaker 04

  But you don't always, right? It happens, right? They clicked. And that was the start. So that was sent by this Portuguese, how do you describe him? Hacker?

• 19:25Pablo Torre?

  Activist.

• 19:26Speaker 04

  Activist, leaker, criminal. And he sent this email and that was the starting pistol for obtaining a treasure trove really of City emails that then made their way into the German investigative newspaper, Der Spiegel. And that essentially revealed that Manchester City had, well, appeared to be cheating the financial rules of both English and European football.

• 19:55Pablo Torre?

  And what Rui Pinto's email, effectively like a phishing, P H phishing email, a hack, what it led to was, yes, this inquiry that in 2019 had investigations launched, in 2020 had UEFA issue sanctions banning Man City from competitions, that though got overturned on appeal, 2023, the Premier League issues 115 charges from 2009 to 2018, that's the timeline of when those would have applied, when those would have happened, 2024, independent commission hearings. And just while this is happening, just to market, from 2018 to present day, Man City won 20 more trophies.

• 20:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, they continued to be hugely successful. They continued to have many Abu Dhabi sponsors during that time period. I think it was seen as impolite almost by some journalists, former soccer players, the kind of people that you would generally see in a studio covering kind of Premier League soccer, to kind of focus too much on it. Cause it's like, oh, it's all been so drawn out, it's so long. You almost start to feel mad for, or made to feel mad for continuing to question it during that time. I mean, I remember when City won the league in maybe 2023, I was there that day when they lifted the trophy

• 21:23Speaker 04

  and they'd been, you know, they'd been called cheats in terms of City, the Premier League investigation. They charged them, but obviously it was, the hearing was going to go on. And the Premier League CEO, Richard Masters, walked out that day and was booed by the City fans. You had a banner in the stands where the Manchester City fans had a banner of the lawyer that was working on it, the barrister, Lord Panic. It was like, something like Panic in the Streets of London was on the banner, Premier League being in London. I wrote a piece that day that said, you know, Manchester City Premier League champions, asterisks, because they had been charged at that point. And, you know, there was many people who didn't, you know, didn't like that because it was uncomfortable. And I think, you know,

• 22:08Speaker 04

  what City's approach appeared to be during this time, even though they said at that time, they continue to say they had an irrefutable body of evidence that which would demonstrate.

• 22:18Pablo Torre?

  Provably false is what they were saying about all of this in effect.

• 22:22Speaker 04

  Yeah. But at the same time, they appeared to be obstructing and prevaricating at every step.

• 22:30Pablo Torre?

  Well, this brings me to just something that happens last season, which is eye opening, given the backdrop, which is that the all time great manager, Pep Guardiola, steps down. And I just want to play a bit of what he said about ownership in his last press conference as manager.

• 22:47Speaker 06

  What made you feel so, so passionate about defending the club and? Because I trust them. I trust them. Because I spoke with them and I trust how they behave and how they, they did. So what happened, what happened, that will be the resolution. Nobody of the staff, backroom staff, mainly of the players and manager was here. So it was a long, long time ago. So, and I trust them. I said before what happened and I said, no.

• 23:21Pablo Torre?

  So smash cut to 40 page document, heavily redacted, but also despite that incredibly detailed, fascinatingly detailed. And you learn that from, yes, 2009 to 2018. So in fairness, mostly, but not entirely before Pep Guardiola's time as manager, he arrived in 2016, you have, yes, findings of guilt across 54 charges related to failure to provide accurate financial data, 35 related to failure to cooperate with the Premier League's investigation itself. Then the rest, you know, compensation and fair play rules. And I don't know what your favorite quote in this thing is, but there's some pretty remarkable ones.

• 24:03Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, the CEO of the Premier League, Richard Masters, he, you know, he, he says, this report details how the club systematically broke Premier League rules for nearly a decade. The commission used the term sham contracts.

• 24:18Pablo Torre?

  Manchester City arranged, quote unquote, sham contracts, parentheses, which misrepresented the true agreement between the parties, close parentheses, with a number of its commercial partners, as well as relying on, quote unquote, sham agreements with others to artificially inflate the club's revenues and reduce its costs, end quote.

• 24:34Speaker 04

  Sham is a, it is a legal term, but it's also something that is very understandable to the public.

• 24:42Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 24:42Speaker 04

  The word sham is, I think it's going to be on banners at stadiums by rival fans. You know, you've had columnists, right, right, opinion pieces about the sham club. I think that word has real cut through. I think it's incredibly damaging. And we also found out that, you know, they, the sponsorship income was basically overstated, if you like, the real sponsorship income by 830 million pounds, right? Like, this is a lot of money.

• 25:10Pablo Torre?

  And in terms of how this scheme worked, so I guess you just got to explain for everybody just the rules they were trying to circumvent here.

• 25:20Speaker 04

  So, I mean, for most of the time, you could lose, as a Premier League club, you could lose 105 million over a three year period. And generally, the way that you generate income as a soccer club is you'll have your TV revenue, your media rights, you will have player trading, you will have commercial revenue, so your sponsors, you'll have your gate receipts, so the tickets that you're selling for people to come through the doors, your merchandise, your licensing, maybe you'll do a documentary, et cetera. Those are kind of the general principles. But Man City had a problem, well, they had a couple of problems. One is that their stadium was a lot smaller than, for example, Manchester United's. And from a commercial point of view, if you just went to market as Manchester City, you were

• 26:04Speaker 04

  not going to drive the kind of commercial revenue as you were if you were Manchester United, Arsenal, Real Madrid, Barcelona, these globally recognized brands from a long period of time. Now, there are many people who argue these rules actually were designed to gatekeep, right? Because if you can only lose a certain amount of money, i.e. owner equity investment is, is limited and you have to rely on commercial revenue, you therefore can't, there is this ceiling that you hit. You can't get to actually spend what your owner is able to spend.

• 26:42Pablo Torre?

  Right. There is a salary cap parallel in this sense. Both rule regimes are designed to protect owners from themselves.

• 26:50Speaker 04

  Yes. And also, there had been some very high profile examples in the kind of early 2000s of major English soccer clubs, Leeds United, Portsmouth, almost going out of business by overspending. There was a dual thing going on. One was, we need to protect these clubs because they're community assets. And two, I think you had some opportunistic owners who were concerned, particularly after Chelsea with the Russian Roman Abramovich, who was spending a lot of money, saying, we need to sort of limit how much money is spent here because it's going to distort the competition. And you can see the argument for that because if Abu Dhabi can basically spend, not that it's owned by Abu Dhabi, but someone with the access to a huge amount of money in Abu Dhabi can just spend unlimited money, then

• 27:35Speaker 04

  that's going to lead to a very imbalanced playing field. So you can understand it, but maybe it went too far. Regardless, these are the rules that Man City signed up to.

• 27:44Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 27:44Speaker 04

  That's the, really the start and the end of it. City signed up to rules, whether they agreed with them or not. Now, what City did was twofold. They went into sponsorship arrangements with these Abu Dhabi sponsors, as we say. So, you know, the sponsors aren't named in the.

• 28:05Pablo Torre?

  Those are among the redactions.

• 28:06Speaker 04

  They're among the redactions. But you only need to look at around the stadium during that time for who the hope, you know, as, as we say, there was airlines, there was banks, there was.

• 28:15Pablo Torre?

  Yeah. And you only need to read at least one of the statements coming out from a company that was not named, but is already protesting how they are implied to be one of the companies, which happens to be Etihad.

• 28:23Speaker 04

  Which happens to be Etihad. So there's two things. One is the sponsorship agreements with Abu Dhabi companies were judged to be above fair market value. And what that means is if I was to go as the Manchester City marketing commercial team into meetings with seven blue chip companies, this is not the value I would have got. These are a lot higher. These are inflated values which aren't real, right? And that's possibly because of privileged relationships that you would have as kind of the owners with some of these companies where there's a lot of crossover between the people involved. That's kind of the insinuation. The other part of it is not only were these sponsorships.

• 29:06Speaker 04

  Above fair market value, but the sponsors themselves weren't paying a lot of the money. The actual money, the commission claims, was being paid by Abu Dhabi United Group, which is the vehicle which was owned by Sheikh Mansour.

• 29:22Pablo Torre?

  Just to recap it as simply as I can, we need to increase our revenues so we have permission to spend our money on players.

• 29:29Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 29:30Pablo Torre?

  And so the scheme that's been outlined is, okay, so then we need business deals with our team sponsors who are willing to pay us a lot more than they need to.

• 29:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:43Pablo Torre?

  And the thing we got to figure out is, how can we make it so that they want to do it? Well, perhaps, according to this report, one way to do it is to not actually have them need to pay out the money that they have now counted on our balance sheet as revenue.

• 29:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, essentially, the commission is claiming that a lot of this sponsorship money was disguised as sponsorship money, but was in fact indirect owner investment, right? So the Man City owners were basically paying it. And when you look at the numbers, City's total commercial revenues over the period in question, from 2009 to 2018, were stated to be 1.3 billion-ish. Of that, 950 million of it attributable to Abu Dhabi-based sponsors. So that's 70% of it was Abu Dhabi-based sponsors. But within that 950 million, only 119 million was actually paid by those sponsors,

• 30:40Speaker 04

  and 830 million of it was paid by the City owner investment vehicle.

• 30:46Pablo Torre?

  Which is another way of saying, it looks like you're paying yourself the money that you're saying was paid to you by someone else.

• 30:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, so not only have you created basically fake value agreements, but you've also funded it.

• 31:04Pablo Torre?

  I mean, the funneling and the round-tripping of your own money in order to enable the opening of your chequebook to the degree that you want. I mean, this is, again, it's the Clippers thing, but it's a fascinating wrinkle in it, because in the NBA, you are, in the case of Steve Ballmer, allegedly trying to circumvent the rules so that you are allowed to spend your own money, effectively send money out. In this case, what they needed to do first was get money in.

• 31:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, and the way they got money in was by putting their own money. In some ways, it's a bit crazy, because they've basically just tried to spend too much money to win for their team.

• 31:43Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 31:44Speaker 04

  Right, so in some ways, it's what all fans want their owners to want to do, but they signed up to a set of rules and they broke them. So Roberto Mancini, who was the Italian City head coach who won them their first Premier League, I mean, arguably the most famous moment in the history of the Premier League, Sergio Aguero scores in the final kick of the game in 2012 to take the title away from Manchester United. Mancini is the coach. It turns out, he almost had two contracts. One was with the club, and one was a consultancy agreement for another club that was owned by Sheikh Mansour, by which he was getting paid for, I think, four days consultancy work, more than he was being paid for his day job at Manchester City.

• 32:28Speaker 04

  So these are the sort of examples where that, combined with City having commercial revenue, I think over the decade between 2010 to 2020, on average, 600 million more than Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool during that time. Between those examples, I struggle with what Pep is saying, where he is saying, I trust them. Because any kind of lay-reading of this should be setting alarm bells off.

• 32:58Pablo Torre?

  And there are emails that attest to the moving of money and the labelling and relabelling of money with clarity and, again, the familiar exculpatory argument here is effectively one of, we're just little babies who don't know how money works.

• 33:14Speaker 04

  Right, and you don't write it down if you're going to do it.

• 33:18Pablo Torre?

  And this is one of my favourite through lines in all of this year of financial corruption in sports has been, writing it down. As well as, by the way, just like doing stuff that, when you see it through the lens of hindsight, just becomes hilarious. This is one of my favourites, Adam. This is July 2022, and the headline from this point in time is, quote, "Manchester City and 8X Bet announce new regional partnership that will see the brand become the official betting partner of a club in Asia." And I don't know if you knew what 8X Bet was at the time. It remains relatively little-known. It was, at that point, a new bookmaker.

• 33:57Speaker 04

  Right.

• 33:58Pablo Torre?

  And I just point all this out because, by way of introduction to the broader planet, 8X Bet posted an official signing announcement with former English striker Teddy Sheringham. Can we freeze that for a second? Can we rewind that briefly and freeze it? It says, "8X Bet Brand Ambassador Signing Ceremony with his name in big capital letters across the top." And what is Mr. Sheringham doing in front of this logoed backdrop?

• 34:27Speaker 04

  He appears to be shaking the hand of some sort of executive.

• 34:30Pablo Torre?

  Shaking the hand of a apparent female official in a suit who, spoiler alert, turns out to be, first pointed out by a Norwegian outlet, Jo Sømarr, and then the journalist Nikkaris, not an 8X Bet executive, it turns out, but, as we also do our due diligence on this, a model based in London named Jasmine, who you can find otherwise posing in fashion shoots, bikini lingerie stuff, who, most crucially, holds no role at 8X Bet. And this is important to note, Adam, this is not the same woman, it seems, who is separately

• 35:10Pablo Torre?

  listed, or was listed on LinkedIn, as one of the co-founders of 8X Bet, a woman of Asian descent, whose photo turns out to be a stock image for Asian businesswoman. Which is to say that you scratched the surface of any one of these proper names and companies, and some stuff seems to just start spilling out.

• 35:35Speaker 04

  This is all post-2018, that stuff that we're showing there. And I would say, that was during a period where you had a real rise of, I'd say fake betting companies, but controversial betting companies, crypto companies, where the root sources of it were very unclear. I think a lot of journalists at that time were digging into that. I don't think that would have been something City came up with. I think they'd have been duped themselves, and it probably felt quite stupid afterwards. But City were still adding more Abu Dhabi sponsors as well during that time. So they added Mazda, owned by Mubadala, the investment company, who is the CEO of

• 36:20Speaker 04

  Mubadala, Kaldun Almabarak, the Man City chairman. He's not on the board of Mazda, but his sister was on the board of Mazda. And then we saw Aldar Properties, again, Almabarak, continuing shareholder in Aldar. His brother, I think, was the chair of that board. Now, again, there's nothing wrong with that, per se, but all it shows is this continuing dependence that Manchester City had on Abu Dhabi sponsors, far beyond 2018. They renegotiated the Etihad deal again. And City always claimed at that time, it was almost like they were saying, well, you're

• 37:00Speaker 04

  suggesting there's a murky web between Arab businessmen, and that would be almost discriminatory for you to suggest that. And it wasn't that. It was about showing that there was this excessive dependence, and that this commercial income, was it fair market value? And was it a balanced playing field that they were operating on at that time? That's post-2018. Now, there's no investigations we're currently aware of during that time.

• 37:26Pablo Torre?

  But just to be clear about what you're saying, though, is that within the scope of the investigation that brought us 114 of 115 charges being found, yes, guilty, there is already the natural question of what about right after that?

• 37:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it's definitely a fair question, whether anyone has the...

• 37:49Pablo Torre?

  The emails.

• 37:50Speaker 04

  The emails, the energy, frankly.

• 37:53Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 37:54Speaker 04

  I think there would be a question of, if City are, in the eyes of most of the league, most of the public, sanctioned appropriately, like, do you actually need to go and do another investigation?

• 38:14Pablo Torre?

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• 38:55Pablo Torre?

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• 40:14Speaker 07

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• 40:45Pablo Torre?

  In this story, we go back to where you're from. Because in the real world, this is not merely the story of Man City proclaiming, we are still innocent. How dare you imply otherwise? While we await their, their evidence to the contrary. It's also the story of a geopolitical dynamic that I have been fascinated by that you have been covering personally.

• 41:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, and this is, this is something we've seen, I think increasingly with, why do people buy in to the Premier League? And also buy sports teams, I think, all over, all over the world, the United States as well is, it's rarely just about what the team does on the field. We talk a lot now about land, about the opportunity to buy up land at pretty good rates, be embedded within a community, have a good feeling from that community. And I think that's something that, you know, the, the Abu Dhabi investors in Manchester City, bought into Manchester at a time where, you know, 2008, what's going on 2008, 2009, financial crash.

• 41:52Speaker 04

  You have a government that comes in around 2010 that it's really an austerity project where they have to tighten their belts. And the idea of public investment is really for the birds during that period. You can't invest a huge amount when you're having to cut public spending. And Abu Dhabi kind of rides in, you know, it rides in and it, it starts to buy up land. It starts to buy up property. It invests a lot.

• 42:16Pablo Torre?

  In Manchester.

• 42:17Speaker 04

  In Manchester, you know, the area of East Manchester that they invested in, I think previously, you know, I spoke to the current Business Secretary of the UK, Jonathan Reynolds, a couple of weeks ago. You know, he said, we're talking about estates here that people would abandon. You know, that these were places people didn't want to live. That's the way he would frame it. And what has been built since is, you know, luxury towers, properties, not a huge amount of affordable housing, I would say. But there has been big stadium redevelopment, a fantastic Etihad training campus. I'm using the brand. There's a new arena, the Co-op Arena that is now next to the stadium that I think they're 50 50 on

• 42:59Speaker 04

  or just majority on, that the NBA is going to play at in January as well.

• 43:03Pablo Torre?

  Yes, NBA Europe is, is perfectly and poetically happening in real time. The raising of capital.

• 43:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:10Pablo Torre?

  To figure out where are we going to put our own European basketball teams?

• 43:13Speaker 04

  Yeah. And what you had during, really during the past decade or so, was Manchester growing disproportionately to the rest of the UK. So annual growth, 3.1%. It was much higher than the rest of the UK. There was a feeling of things are happening. You know, every time I would go back to Manchester on the train from London or now when I fly back, you would see cranes, you would see things being built. You know, people started to call, some people started to call it Mankhatton, right? It was, it was this feeling of this is getting nicer.

• 43:44Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 43:44Speaker 04

  Right? Was it, you know, like all gentrification stories? Was it always better for everyone who was there before? No, right? Of course, there's going to be winners and losers of that. And, you know, there's, there's obviously people who would argue therefore it should never have happened. And it was an awful deal, et cetera. But, you know, visually you would drive through and you would have the sense of this is a place that's getting better.

• 44:11Pablo Torre?

  And I just want to remind people, like Manchester, you know, 18th century industrial powerhouse, cotton, right? This is one of the mercantilist centers of, of earth. And over time, of course, it is a story of, yes, struggle amid industrial revolution. And it becomes really hard to be a Mancunian.

• 44:31Speaker 04

  If, if you look at the census, the kind of population census of the early nineties, there was, I think, less than a thousand people living in the center of Manchester.

• 44:40Pablo Torre?

  Wow.

• 44:40Speaker 04

  You now have, I think, over a hundred thousand people. So, I mean, it is indisputable that Manchester has grown during that time. Not only that, but the mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham, who came in in 2017, started to really hitch his political platform to what he called Manchesterism, right? And it was this sense of by devolving powers to local authorities and mayors to do more of their own deals and have more powers. And also giving this sense that Manchester has some sort of like unique get up and go attitude that gave it possibilities. That if you tuck that onto a national platform, the country more broadly would be able to grow. He's now the Prime Minister.

• 45:25Pablo Torre?

  Right. Andy is being asked about what he thinks about the punishment.

• 45:31Speaker 07

  I do actually thank the City Football Group and the, you know, the wider ownership for the money that they didn't just put into the Etihad and the campus around it, but also into, into the city. Do you worry they might sell up? Well, I would be really concerned to lose them. They've been such a huge partner in the building of modern Manchester. And obviously the building of Manchester City into the global force that it, that it is. I can't intervene more in the process. It would be wrong for me to do that.

• 46:03Speaker 04

  It's important to say, you know, the UK, you know, as you say, post industrial revolution, it's not really a country that makes stuff anymore.

• 46:11Pablo Torre?

  That's right.

• 46:11Speaker 04

  It's a services country. And that means you open yourselves to foreign investment. That is why, you know, many of the things that, you know, maybe Americans consider to be, you know, very British, I don't know, the Shard, Harrods, airports, Heathrow Airport. Many of them are owned by, to a certain extent, by Gulf states, right? This is the story of the UK. It's not unique to Manchester or Manchester City. And the story of the Premier League in fact is being open to foreign investment. Roman Abramovich, even if it's highly questionable money. Newcastle now owned by the Saudi Public Investment Fund. A huge amount of US private equity.

• 46:56Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 46:56Speaker 04

  You know, as, as well has come in. So this isn't just Manchester City, right? Let's be kind of clear on that. Now, he was asked basically, how would you feel about the possibility of losing these guys? You know, Sheikh Mansour as, as an owner? And, and his answer was basically, you know, I'd be sad to lose them. And not only that, I want to thank them for the investment they provided into Manchester, part of this sports led regeneration. And I actually think that would be a view shared, although opposition politicians are pretending it's not. I think many people in power would have said the same when, when asked because of

• 47:35Speaker 04

  the kind of mutually beneficial relationship that has developed between the UK and the UAE over a long period of time on security, trading, investment. 25 to 30 billion of investment has kind of been pledged over the next kind of five to 10 years. I think it's 25 billion trading relationship annually. You know, there's a lot of, a lot of money is, is going around here. But that doesn't mean you get to come in and cheat in our league.

• 48:04Pablo Torre?

  Well, so this is, so this is what's so fascinating to me is that you can have objections, predating all of this, of course, to the UAE and how they operate. You could object to how they deal with Russia in their war and their invasion of Ukraine. You can have concerns very rightfully about how they're dealing with Sudan and the death at scale happening in that nation. But there is something different about a financial scandal in sports that has teeth and obvious meaning to everyday people. Let's now just add this wrinkle though, which Andy Burnham is speaking to in the real world, which is also this dynamic of dependence.

• 48:46Pablo Torre?

  We've now described how Man City has depended in all of these schemed ways on Abu Dhabi and its arrayed businesses. And here you have the other side, which is that Manchester, the city itself, has depended on Abu Dhabi and its arrayed businesses for its financial rejuvenation in parallel.

• 49:06Speaker 04

  And it's also important to say, the UAE, the UAE is a, is a valued partner of the UK. Of course it is. But it's not one way, right? You know, the UK is providing, I think, subtle support in terms of helping to protect the UAE amid what's going on with Iran and Israel and the US. There's also 250,000 Brits who now live in the UAE, you know, Dubai, right?

• 49:31Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, yes. And, and the other thing that's happening in Abu Dhabi particularly, as we contemplate, what is this story also about? The NBA plays preseason games in Abu Dhabi every year. They have been for several years now. They are raising money right now from sovereign wealth funds to fund NBA Europe.

• 49:50Speaker 04

  So that's the point. This isn't a pariah.

• 49:52Pablo Torre?

  It's on the Knicks jersey.

• 49:53Speaker 04

  Right.

• 49:54Pablo Torre?

  Visit Abu Dhabi is on the Knicks jersey as they won the title. So this is entangled in ways that are so far beyond Man City. But I do want to focus us near the end here just because the question I'm left with, as this is a story about how people give a [BLEEP] because there are consequences in sports. And in particularly, the most popular sport in the world. What is the potential punishment here?

• 50:22Speaker 04

  I mean, the great thing about the Premier League rulebook is it really allows for anything. So, you know, this could be anything from a huge fine, which I don't think would actually satisfy the other teams in the Premier League at all and would lead to an incredible amount, I think, of team on team lawsuits. You could have huge points deductions, which would make Man City almost certainly relegated out of the Premier League. If City continue to fight this and fight this and fight this, the other clubs could even vote to expel them from the Premier League. They then would have to be accepted into the lower divisions. So the possibilities are pretty endless.

• 51:07Speaker 04

  I mean, there was an idea that was put to me by a former, very senior Premier League executive a couple of years ago that was kind of saying, what City managed to do by cheating financially in those early days was accelerate themselves, you know, by spending so much so fast in an unfair way to basically put themselves into a dominant position. And therefore, the fairest way to punish them is to decelerate them. And that would mean not only a hefty initial points deduction, but then also for the next few years they're in the Premier League, actually giving them negative 10, 15, 20, whatever points at the start of each season, so that it limits their capacity to compete at the top of the league, to qualify for the Champions League.

• 51:52Speaker 04

  Means they can't get the revenues from the Champions League that they would otherwise get.

• 51:57Pablo Torre?

  Is a forced sale on the table? Could they force the owners of Man City to sell?

• 52:02Speaker 04

  I don't think the Premier League could, per se, but there is this new independent football regulator. That independent body would have the ability, I think theoretically, to kind of basically say these owners are no longer fit to remain. I also wonder, and you know, I was speaking to one of the longest standing Abu Dhabi academics, Christopher Davidson, over the weekend. And what he was saying, you know, he was in Abu Dhabi at the time when they first acquired the club. He said they bought this to help their reputation.

• 52:40Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 52:40Speaker 04

  Right, and it's turning into a negative. So at what point here do they just actually decide for themselves to cut the losses, not have this kind of festering stain? I think was the way he described it. And essentially just decide to, you know, sell up. Now, the problem is, if they were to sell,

• 53:02Speaker 04

  would they be selling, you know, previously, I think they've been saying this is a club that could be worth $6 billion in terms of the whole ownership group with all the different clubs, et cetera. Now, you know, first of all, if they're relegated, which would mean they lose a lot of their talent, could their talent extricate themselves without sort of big transfer fees because the club's brought itself into disgrace, disrepute? A lot of the commercial revenues would disappear because the Abu Dhabi's would disappear. So this would be a club with potentially a very big wage bill, with not very much commercial revenue, with an awful reputation. I don't know how appealing that would be at the valuation that Abu Dhabi thought it was, you know, a week ago.

• 53:46Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, I mean, again, the quote that we led with was from Khalid Al Mubarak in 2008. "There is almost a personification of the club with the values we hold as Abu Dhabi." And right now, what you're seeing is that there is still something to be decided when it comes to what that club is going to be and what its values and value is going to be as well.

• 54:12Speaker 04

  And then you get into the question of what sanction can the Premier League give, you know, that doesn't offend Abu Dhabi to the point at which they are, you know, I mean, there were stories over the weekend of they might walk away from an investment between Oxford and Cambridge University, that they might walk away from this, walk away from that. My suspicion is there's a bit of bluff going on. But are the UAE prepared to go that far over a soccer punishment or not? We don't know. We don't know, is the reality.

• 54:45Pablo Torre?

  So the not knowing, but the plausible reality that the world order, and I don't mean sports. I mean, the geopolitical order of our planet may hinge on soccer, is both shocking on the one hand and of course on the other.

• 55:03Speaker 04

  You can say that.

• 55:07Pablo Torre?

  Adam Crafton, I don't think this is the, this is the end of our conversations about this story. I feel like in some ways, despite it taking years to get here, like we're just getting started.

• 55:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, is that, what's this phrase about kind of decades happening in a day or something like that? There's decades where nothing happens and weeks where decades happen. And we've waited for a decade where nothing's happened, and now the decade has happened.

• 55:33Pablo Torre?

  I do feel like we're getting too old for this [BLEEP].

• 55:44Pablo Torre?

  Pablo Torre Finds Out is produced by Walter Avaroma, Maxwell Carney, Ryan Cortez, Juan Galindo, Patrick Kim, Neely Loman, Rob McCray, Laura Newcomb, Matt Sullivan, Claire Taylor, and Chris Tumanello. Studio engineering by RG Systems, sound design by Andrew Bersick, digital strategy by Bailey Carlin and Andrew Northern, theme song, as always, by John Bravo. And we'll talk to you next time.