The sheikh who conquered soccer

Sydney Morning Herald

10 hours ago

Nairobi: Weeks before Sudan flamed into a calamitous civil war, one of the richest men in the Middle East, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, welcomed an architect of the chaos to his sumptuous Persian Gulf palace.
The sheikh, a younger brother of the ruler of the United Arab Emirates, is recognised in the West as a collector of super-yachts and racehorses, and he is perhaps best known as the owner of Manchester City, a hugely successful English soccer club. Last year, his team in New York won approval to build a $US780 million soccer stadium in the borough of Queens, the first in the city.
Yet there he was, in February 2023, openly entertaining a notorious commander from the deserts of western Sudan – someone who had seized power in a coup, built a fortune on illicit gold and was accused of widespread atrocities.
The two men knew each other well. Mansour had hosted the Sudanese commander, General Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, two years earlier at an arms fair in the UAE, where they toured exhibits of rockets and drones.
And when Sudan's conflict exploded in April 2023, Mansour helped the general to wage war.
Charities controlled by Mansour set up a hospital, saying they were treating civilians. But that humanitarian effort was also a cover for the secret Emirati effort to smuggle drones and other powerful weapons to Dagalo's group, the Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, according to US and UN officials.
A flood of evidence has emerged of massacres, mass rape and genocide by Dagalo's forces. The Emiratis deny arming any side in the war, but the US has intercepted regular phone calls between Dagalo and the leaders of the UAE, including Mansour.
The intelligence helped US officials conclude that the unassuming Emirati royal has played a central role in the effort to arm Dagalo's forces, inflaming a devastating conflict that has led to famine and the world's biggest humanitarian crisis.
Mansour, Dagalo and the UAE Foreign Ministry did not respond to detailed questions about their ties and roles in the war.
Despite owning one of the world's most famous soccer teams, Mansour, 54, has remained an enigma, often showing a chameleon-like ability to disappear into the background, overshadowed by his more prominent or powerful siblings.
Yet, in interviews with more than a dozen US, African and Arab officials, he is described as being at the sharp end of his country's aggressive push to expand its influence across Africa and the Middle East.
In places such as Libya and Sudan, they say, Mansour has coddled warlords and autocrats as part of a sweeping Emirati drive to acquire ports and strategic minerals, counter Islamist movements and establish the Persian Gulf nation as a heavyweight regional power.
While his brother, the hawkish ruler of the UAE, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, undoubtedly steers that policy, Mansour has quietly carved out a powerful backing role bolstering the nation's soft power through soccer while also fostering ties with armed leaders in some of the world's most fragile countries, the officials say.
'He's the fixer, the handler, the one sent to places without much glamour or publicity, but which are important to the Emiratis,' former senior US diplomat Andrew Miller said. 'That seems to be his niche.'
At least half a dozen other officials described Mansour the same way.
In the West, Mansour has largely remained under the radar. He rarely meets Western diplomats; he does not speak to reporters; and he has hardly ever attended games of Manchester City, the celebrated team he owns. When his ventures have become embroiled in international charges of corruption or breaching international arms embargoes, he has avoided censure.
Now, though, that sense of gilded immunity is starting to crack.
Last year, the British government passed a law that, in effect, prevented Mansour from acquiring a venerable newspaper, fearing it could affect press freedom. Trials in the US and Malaysia have uncovered accusations that Mansour profited from the 1MDB scandal, one of the world's biggest financial frauds.
The worsening war in Sudan, a sprawling conflict that has caused more than 150,000 deaths and displaced more than 12 million people, has led to accusations that the UAE is bankrolling a genocide. Democratic lawmakers have called for a block on US weapons sales to the UAE.
And now, Mansour's sporting jewel is under siege.
A British panel is considering sweeping accusations that Manchester City has cheated on a grand scale. His team has been accused by its own league of manipulating its finances to fund the purchase of star players who assured the club's stunning run of victories, transforming it from a group of stumbling has-beens into an international sporting phenomenon.
Manchester City denies the accusations, but if found guilty, the team could be fined, expelled or stripped of its many titles. It is also a moment of reckoning for Mansour, whose dealings are now under the kind of spotlight he has long sought to avoid.
Manchester City did not respond to a request for comment.
Whatever the ruling, the case raises the prospect that the extraordinary secrecy he has enjoyed, fuelled by a seemingly inexhaustible spigot of money, may be coming to an end.
This is the story of the sheikh who preferred to stay hidden.
The sheikh of soccer
In his grandparents' generation, most inhabitants of what is now the UAE were date farmers, camel herders and pearl fishermen. The discovery of oil in the 1960s set off a breathtaking transformation that first focused on the city-state of Dubai.
Mirrored buildings sprang from the desert, and ski runs now twist through shopping malls, turning the city into an archetype of petrostate bling.
The more conservative capital, Abu Dhabi, has turned into a finance hotspot and an aspiring artificial intelligence superpower. The city has become such a global investment hub that it bills itself as the 'capital of capital'.
One family sits at the top.
The al-Nahyans of Abu Dhabi are the world's second-richest family, after the Waltons of the US, by some estimates. They have ruled the UAE since independence in 1971, and their power is concentrated in a group known as the 'Bani Fatima' – six sons of the favoured wife of the country's founding father, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan. Three of the sons dominate.
The eldest brother, Mohammed, 64, known as MBZ, has been the de facto ruler for more than two decades.
Under him is Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al-Nahyan, 56, often referred to as the 'spy sheikh', a sunglasses-wearing national security adviser and fitness enthusiast who likes to play chess on his super-yacht and who has bonded with Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg over jujitsu.
The third-most powerful brother, Mansour, keeps a much lower profile.
As deputy prime minister and vice president, he controls key institutions, including the UAE central bank, the national oil company and the Abu Dhabi criminal authority. He chairs Mubadala, a fast-growing $US330 billion ($505 billion) sovereign wealth fund with investments in artificial intelligence, semiconductors and space tourism.
He is a key figure in his country's efforts to acquire global sway through soft power, including trying to build a media empire. He has partnered with British Sky Broadcasting and CNN for television stations and websites in Arabic, and he has handed a $US1 billion war chest to Jeff Zucker, a former president of CNN, to acquire media outlets around the world.
In public, Mansour tends to linger on the sidelines. He is often seen sponsoring traditional Emirati activities such as camel races and date festivals. His statements are mostly notable for how bland they are.
But in the world of soccer, he has become a veritable giant, helping the royals rebrand themselves after a devastating setback. In 2006, two years before Mansour bought Manchester City, the UAE suffered a very public rejection. Its attempt to buy six seaports in the US was blocked amid a fierce political backlash, even though the UAE had allied closely with Washington after September 11.
It was a seminal moment, causing UAE leaders to set about reshaping their international image by investing in culture, academia and sport. Mansour led the charge on soccer.
Only hours after buying Manchester City for $US330 million, he forked out a record sum for a new player – the first in a string of expensive acquisitions, costing at least $US3.5 billion, that transformed the team into a soccer behemoth.
Manchester City soon picked up their first championship in decades. Since then, they have won the Premier League another seven times, as well as the biggest prize in club soccer, the Champions League. In 2023, the club raked in $US100 million in profits from almost $US1 billion in revenues, ranking it among the most lucrative sports teams in the world.
'Sheikh Mansour, Manchester Thanks You,' reads a banner that hangs permanently at its home stadium, which is named after Etihad Airways, a national carrier of the UAE.
As the trophies piled up, Mansour bought a dozen other teams, including in Melbourne; Mumbai; and Yokohama. The new stadium for his soccer team in New York – New York City FC – will have a name similar to the one in Manchester: Etihad Park.
Rival Persian Gulf nations have followed suit, snapping up their own British or European teams.
Manchester City has also served political purposes. Team officials invited journalists to briefings in 2014 by consultants working for the UAE. Rather than discussing soccer, the briefings sought to link Qatar, a rival of the UAE, to international terrorism, according to a journalist present and a briefing dossier seen by The New York Times.
Mansour's personal passion for soccer, however, is unclear. Since buying Manchester City 17 years ago, he has seen the team play just twice in competition, and only once at the Etihad Stadium.
But in that period, UAE priorities have shifted to hard power as well – and so have Mansour's.
The handler
The Arab Spring in 2011 was a turning point for the family.
As autocrats were toppled across the Middle East, the family worried that it might be next. The UAE ruler, Mohammed, told Western officials that he feared the surging strength of Islamist political groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and vowed to stop them in their tracks.
The UAE intervened forcefully in countries such as Egypt, Libya and Yemen. But that often involved backing military takeovers, arming rebels or forging alliances with unreformed warlords. To manage some of those relationships, a delicate hand was needed.
Enter Mansour.
On orders from his brother, the Emirati ruler, Mansour assumed the role of managing 'unseemly and unsightly yet important strongmen' in various places, as one former senior US official put it.
In Libya, the favoured strongman was Khalifa Hifter, a one-time CIA asset who promised to fill the chaotic vacuum left by the death of Muammar Gaddafi, Libya's leader. Just as importantly, Hifter was opposed to Islamist groups.
From about 2015, US officials noticed that Mansour was regularly speaking with Hifter, and that he was quietly 'handling' the relationship, several US officials said.
'That's when we realised the Emiratis were putting their money' on Hifter, one official said.
The alliance caused some friction with Washington. UAE weapons poured into Libya, in breach of an international arms embargo. Even some US weapons that had been sold to the UAE showed up in Libya, a senior official said. In 2020, the Pentagon said the UAE had most likely paid for mercenaries from Russia's Wagner Group to fight alongside Hifter as he attacked the Libyan capital.
But there was little public blowback for the UAE, which by then had turned its attention to another strategically valuable country: Sudan.
There, the longtime ruler, President Omar al-Bashir, was allied with Iran, a fierce competitor with many Arab states for influence in the region. Mansour was tasked with wooing him to the Emirati side, Sudanese and US officials said. A series of back-channel meetings culminated in 2017 with a high-profile visit by al-Bashir to Abu Dhabi.
Soon, billions in UAE aid were flowing into Sudan, according to UAE state media.
Many US officials were appalled. Al-Bashir was wanted by the International Criminal Court at The Hague for his role in the genocide in Darfur a decade earlier. For the UAE, though, it was a fruitful alliance: Al-Bashir deployed troops to Yemen to fight alongside the UAE and Saudi Arabia in their war against the Iran-backed Houthis.
That was also the start of a new relationship. Many of the troops sent to Yemen belonged to the RSF, which was then a recently formed paramilitary group led by Dagalo.
The general quickly became a close ally of Mansour.
'We always understood that, behind the scenes on Sudan, lay Mansour,' former US envoy to the Horn of Africa Jeffrey Feltman said.
Gatsbys of the Gulf
When he is not dealing with warlords or soccer teams, Mansour is known to indulge in luxuries that only the ultrarich can afford.
By many accounts, he has owned several of the world's biggest super-yachts – floating palaces with opulent interiors. His latest, according to yachting industry reports, is the $US600 million Blue. Some say it is named after the Manchester City colours, and, at 160 metres, the vessel is far longer than any field the team has ever played on.
A decade ago, Mansour's taste in boats attracted the attention of US prosecutors, who said he funded another yacht, the Topaz, with the proceeds of the infamous 1MDB scandal. At least $US4.5 billion of Malaysian public money was embezzled through an elaborate financial scheme, then-US attorney-general Loretta Lynch said in 2016. She called it 'the largest kleptocracy case' the US had ever seen. A slew of criminal prosecutions led to the conviction and imprisonment of Malaysia's prime minister, Najib Razak, as well as two senior Wall Street executives, one of whom was sentenced in May.
'There's enough that points to Mansour. But it's clear that nobody wants to touch him.'
Clare Rewcastle Brown, anti-corruption journalist
Media attention in the case initially focused on the splashy habits of Jho Low, a fugitive financier accused of orchestrating the scheme: celebrity parties in Las Vegas, real estate in Beverly Hills and paintings by Pablo Picasso and Claude Monet. But it also led to investigations in about a dozen countries, which eventually surfaced serious accusations against senior UAE officials, including Mansour.
At one trial in New York in 2022, US prosecutors presented evidence that the UAE ambassador to Washington, Yousef al-Otaiba, had received $US40 million in bribes. Nearly half a billion US dollars went to Khadem al-Qubaisi, then the chief executive of one of Mansour's companies, the prosecutors said.
Although prosecutors did not say how much Mansour might have received, they listed him as a 'co-conspirator' in the fraud and, citing Low, placed him at the top of a 'hierarchy of bribes' in the case.
They also presented evidence showing that $US161 million of 1MDB funds were used to repay a loan for Mansour's $US688 million yacht, the Topaz. In 2013, Mansour vacationed on the yacht with Razak in the south of France, a Malaysian anti-corruption official told a court in January.
A year later, actor Leonardo DiCaprio used the yacht during the 2014 soccer World Cup in Brazil.
Mansour has never faced charges related to 1MDB, although in 2023, two of his companies agreed to repay $US1.8 billion to Malaysia, which accused them of facilitating the fraud. Al-Otaiba, who remains the UAE ambassador to Washington, enjoys diplomatic immunity from prosecution, officials said.
Al-Qubaisi, the former chief executive of one of Mansour's companies, was convicted of fraud in the UAE and is serving a 15-year prison sentence. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal in 2019, he said he had been made a 'scapegoat' by Mansour.
Mansour, al-Otaiba and DiCaprio declined to answer questions about 1MDB.
Several US officials involved in the case, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss legally privileged discussions, expressed frustration that Mansour and the UAE had not co-operated with their investigation.
'There's enough that points to Mansour,' Clare Rewcastle Brown, an author of two books on the 1MDB scandal, said. 'But it's clear that nobody wants to touch him.'
Critics said the episode was typical of the privilege enjoyed by UAE leaders, whose immense wealth has often shielded them. Stephanie Williams, a veteran US diplomat who led the UN mission to Libya, compared them to the fictional protagonists of The Great Gatsby.
'They come and wreak havoc with their money and carelessness,' Williams said, paraphrasing a line from the classic American novel. 'And then they leave other people to clean up their mess.'
The Khartoum connection
When Dagalo helped seize power in a coup in Sudan in 2021, US officials were furious. They had been assured that civilians, not the military, would govern the country.
But the UAE approved of the takeover, and it soon gave Dagalo a warm official welcome in Abu Dhabi.
The UAE was on its way to surpassing even China as the biggest foreign dealmaker in Africa. Companies led by the al-Nahyan family have poured billions into African mines, data centres and carbon credits as the Persian Gulf country seeks to wean its economy off oil.
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Yet for a handful of strategically located nations, the UAE has also acted as an arms-supplying kingmaker.
In 2021, Mohammed rescued the beleaguered prime minister of Ethiopia, Abiy Ahmed, by supplying drones that helped to turn the tide of a brutal civil war in his favour.
And when Sudan collapsed into civil war in 2023, the UAE sided firmly with Mansour's ally, Dagalo.
The UAE denies backing either side in Sudan's war. But from the earliest days of the conflict, the US learned that the UAE was sheltering Dagalo in Abu Dhabi and arming his fighters in the field, US officials said.
First, Dagalo flew to the UAE, where he was given sanctuary in a protected residence and recorded videotaped speeches to supporters in Sudan, US officials said. Soon after, the UAE mounted a covert scheme to arm Dagalo's group, the RSF, from a desert air base in eastern Chad.
The general's appeal to the UAE was threefold, US officials said. He was loyal because he had fought for the Emiratis in Yemen. He was co-operative because his businesses were based in the UAE, where he sold gold and bought weapons. And he was a self-proclaimed enemy of Islamist groups.
Using phone intercepts, US intelligence agencies determined that Dagalo enjoyed a direct line to two leaders of the UAE – Mohammed and Mansour, officials said. They also identified an Emirati official who co-ordinated a network of shell companies that helped to fund and arm the general's forces.
Once the war began, Mansour appeared to cut public ties with Dagalo, but a connection remained.
The UAE sent weapons to the general's forces via an air base in Chad, where they were ostensibly running a field hospital funded by two charities, both controlled or overseen by Mansour. Neither charity responded to questions for this story, but UAE officials said it was 'reckless and harmful' to suggest that the hospital was being used for anything other than humanitarian work.
The UAE is not the only foreign power fuelling the war, and some have sided with Dagalo's enemy, Sudan's military, which has also been accused of war crimes.
Hoping to blunt the foreign meddling, the US envoy to Sudan, Tom Perriello, confronted Mansour personally in 2024 about his support for Dagalo during a meeting in the UAE, a US official said. Mansour deflected the charge, saying the onus for peace lay with his enemies.
'Trial of the century'
In late 2023, in a major boost to the UAE's ambitions in global media, Mansour struck a $US600 million deal to buy The Daily Telegraph newspaper, a bastion of the British conservative establishment.
But less than six months later, the British government blocked the deal with a new law restricting foreign ownership of newspapers. One politician said publicly that it was impossible 'to separate sheikh and state'. Culture secretary Lucy Frazer raised concerns about 'free expression and accurate presentation of news'.
Mansour has encountered other setbacks since then.
In September, Manchester City began to defend itself at a hearing in London that cast doubt on its blistering run of victories.
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The Premier League accuses Manchester City of breaking its rules 130 times, including by funnelling hundreds of millions of dollars from Emirati companies into the team's coffers and disguising those payments as sponsorship deals.
The proceedings have been described as the 'trial of the century' by British sports media. The Premier League is arguably Britain's largest cultural export, making the dispute with Mansour's team hugely costly and potentially damaging.
The stakes extend beyond sport.
UAE officials raised the inquiry during talks with British Foreign Secretary David Lammy during a visit to the UAE last year, according to people with knowledge of the meeting. The issue had become a 'running sore' between the two countries, former British envoy to the Persian Gulf Eddie Lister said.
In Washington, growing disquiet over the UAE's role in Sudan's war has become a bipartisan issue in Congress. At his confirmation hearing in January, Secretary of State Marco Rubio criticised the UAE, accusing the country of supporting a 'genocide' led by Dagalo. Prominent Democrats have pressed for a ban on US weapons sales to the UAE until it stops arming Dagalo's RSF.
Those calls increased in May after the RSF bombed fuel depots, power plants and Sudan's last international airport, using powerful drones that two former US officials said had been provided by the UAE.
But some of the criticism was drowned out days after, when US President Donald Trump visited the UAE.
At the sweeping, marble presidential palace in Abu Dhabi, Trump revelled in the extravagant reception as he signed a $US200 billion artificial intelligence deal with the country, adding to earlier UAE pledges to invest $US1.4 trillion in the US.
'You are a magnificent man, and it's an honour to be with you,' Trump said to Mohammed.
Seated next to them was Mansour, whose Mubadala wealth fund had said it would use a Trump family crypto venture to make a $US2 billion transaction that stands to generate hundreds of millions of dollars for the president's family.
Days later, the Trump administration bypassed Congress and approved another $US1 billion in weapons for the UAE.