In my opinion discussion of Manchester City's conduct has often bordered on the hysterical and it is the financial and economic press (principally the FT and The Economist) that have attended to the geopolitical dimensions that might ultimately be influential.
I was therefore interested to read an Op Ed piece by Stephen Bush in the Pink 'Un yesterday. I must admit that I was quite surprised when I saw Bush on Sky's The Wrap the other night - not the fact of his being there but that he seemed to be to the right of the senior political correspondent of the Daily Telegraph. He needs to remember that his paper endorsed Labour in 2024!
It has to be noted that in large part the article is a pop at Andy Burnham and makes the arguably valid point that what 'Manchesterism' amounted to was selling the city to global investment capital.
Bush argues: 'The fact that Manchester City have been found guilty of 114 of the 115 charges brought against them by the Premier League over breaches of its financial rules divides people. It divides me. On one hand, as an Arsenal fan, I think that City are cheats, and that the only solution is for the club to be hit with huge fines, stripped of their trophies and banished to the lowest reaches of the football pyramid.
Among fans of City’s rivals, this makes me a relative moderate in that I don’t want the club’s ground to be paved over and salted. However, what I don’t want is for the UAE to stop investing in office and retail space in Manchester, London and the UK’s other great cities; for British wealth managers to lose out on Emirati clients to the Swiss or the Americans; and for England’s elite private schools, whether at home or their overseas franchises, to have fewer children from Abu Dhabi in them. So perhaps the paving over of the Etihad Stadium should be put on hold.
Andy Burnham, the prime minister, faces a similar dilemma. In his first gaffe since entering Number 10, when asked what he made of the charges, he responded by extolling the Abu Dhabi United Group, which owns City, for its investment in and around Manchester. Now, I’m sympathetic to the notion that City’s punishment, whatever form it ends up taking, should be accompanied by warm words about the UAE.
But I do have two nagging objections. The first is that Burnham’s words about City’s owners were warmer than anything he has said since becoming prime minister about, say, Qatari investment in Canary Wharf in east London. They were warmer, too, about money coming from Abu Dhabi than about anything that might flow from American banks or Chinese international students.
The second, and more important, objection is that Burnham’s defence of City’s owners came not 24 hours after a speech in which he railed against 40 years of economic choices that, he claims, have made Britain poorer and angrier than it should be. You can’t coherently maintain that it would be a crying shame for east Manchester to lose out on the UAE’s investment and at the same time insist that the economic policy choices made since the 1980s have been a complete disaster.
What could be more in keeping with the past 40 years of economic policy than the previous Labour government standing by when Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan bought Manchester City in 2008, and then watching approvingly as his investments in land and property, as well as the football club, reshaped the city? It’s incoherent to rail against such choices at a national level, as Burnham does when he promises to break with decades of “neoliberalism”, but to embrace and celebrate their impact on Manchester, where he was mayor for nine years.'
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