(Image Source: AS USA; https://tinyurl.com/y6bp2sn8)
By Caleb Helsel
On May 19, 2024, Manchester City Football Club—commonly referred to as “City”—won a fourth straight English Premier League title, becoming the first team in history to win four consecutive championships of the top flight of English football.i
Less than a year after that, the President of Manchester City met with the US President Donald Trump, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and other world leaders to discuss peace and future governance of Gaza at a summit held in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.ii
The President of Manchester City happens to be Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan—or simply Sheikh Mansour—is also Vice President and Deputy Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and a member of the Emirati royal family. He became City’s President in 2008 after his state-backed firm, Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG), purchased a controlling share of the team.iii Since the Emirati takeover, Sheikh Mansour personally bankrolled City’s success, pouring over 1.3 billion British pounds into the club, allowing City to assemble a squad of some of the best players in the world. Manchester City then transformed from a mid-tier club into a sporting juggernaut, winning 23 trophies, including six Premier Leagues, a European championship and a FIFA Club World Cup.iv
Soft Power and Sportswashing
But what is the rationale for the UAE to invest this much in a football club? The answer is that sports form a critical part of the UAE’s desire to project influence abroad by presenting itself to the world as a modern, cosmopolitan state—a process of national self-presentation sometimes referred to as “nation branding”.v
Sociologist George Gerbner described how repeat exposure to media content has the effect of making that content seem legitimate, and thereby shaping the consumer’s sense of reality.vi A fan watching City’s star players scoring goals and winning trophies on the field, all wearing shirts saying “Etihad Airways”, will develop positive feelings towards the company itself and, more broadly, for UAE.vii The Emirates’ aim is to be associated with trophies, goals, and superstars, rather than the country’s record of repressing journalists, prohibiting labor unions, and oppressing migrant workers.viii
In addition, the UAE is utilizing the halo effect—a psychological phenomenon where people will have more positive associations for something related to what they already like— to create communities of regime supporters abroad.ix For the UAE, this provides a vehicle to improve their image by linking themselves to a beloved football club.x
A study into online communities of City fans shows that fans have come to rationalize and defend state ownership of their clubs.xi City fan communities frequently deflect criticism of the club’s ownership by attacking rival executives, sometimes even framing their state-backed leadership as daring upstarts resisting a corrupt sporting elite. Some forums even go as far as expressing glee at the thought of the Emirati state punishing journalists critical of City and its ownership. Most worryingly, in 2018, a contingent of City fans voiced support for the conviction of a British researcher to life in prison in the UAE, even as British press condemned it.xii Most significantly, the lack of pushback or public criticism toward the United Arab Emirates reveals a tacit consent for Emirati control among the fanbase. Taken together, these online narratives prove the UAE’s successful weaponization of the halo effect through tribalistic sports loyalty.
Oil and Blood
The silence of City’s fans is particularly egregious in the context of the UAE’s actions in Sudan. According to a recent expose by The New York Times, Sheikh Mansour has direct ties to Lieutenant General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, leader of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). In 2023, this paramilitary group violently broke with the Sudanese government, sparking the current Sudanese Civil War.xiii According to the Times, Sheikh Mansour has been covertly supplying the RSF with money and weapons using a UAE-sponsored network of charities active in Sudan and neighboring Chad. The RSF has used this support to then carry out genocidal atrocities in western Sudan against ethnic minority communities, which have created over 600,000 refugees.xiv Recently, the RSF’s seizure of the city of El Fasher attracted international attention to the unique violence of the group. Reports and satellite imagery indicated summary executions of civilians, with British intelligence indicating that at least 60,000 people were killed in El Fasher.xv
Testimonies from escapees tell stories of streets littered with corpses and sand stained with blood. Tens of thousands of people have fled the city and tens of thousands more are unaccounted for, believed to still be trapped inside the city and being systematically hunted down by the RSF.xvi More tragically, there are many reports of systematic sexual violence in RSF-controlled areas, including 32 documented cases of rape of underage girls in El Fasher.xvii
Manchester City is conjoined with these horrors as a whitewashing force for the UAE. The same regime that brings guns for the RSF is the same that brings trophies and goals for City. The same money that brings goals and trophies to Manchester brings terror and suffering to Sudan. Despite its success and global popularity, City must be recognized for what it has become–an image-building tool for the UAE that has been wildly successful in distracting from the regime’s foreign policy.
Conclusion
The UAE transformed Manchester City into a global sporting icon, but also an effective tool to farm support abroad. City’s success is a strategic tool to sanitize a regime involved in some of the world’s most severe crimes. The Club’s trophies and the RSF’s massacres are two sides of the same coin. City has made itself into a global brand and joined Europe’s footballing elite in a remarkable span of time, but that success was achieved through ownership by a repressive regime with a vested interest in distracting foreign publics from its misdeeds. Sports are often deeply linked with politics, and Manchester City is a case study of the sinister political machinations behind the trophies and stars on the pitch.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Caleb Helsel
Caleb Helsel is an analyst at the American University Repository for Open-source Research and Analysis (AURORA) and a Masters student studying Global Governance, Politics, and Security. His research on Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s regime in Egypt was published in the Fall 2025 edition of the JIS and his work with AURORA on colectivos in post-Maduro Venezuela was printed in AURORA’s inaugural publication and was featured at the publication launch in April 2026. Caleb’s research focuses on authoritarianism, regime transitions, and political legitimacy. He is originally from Fresno, California.
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