How the Abu Dhabi Takeover Changed Manchester City Forever

When the final whistle blew on the 2023-2024 Premier League season, history had been made. Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City side had won the top-flight title for the fourth time in succession, having also won it on six out of the seven previous occasions that it had taken place. Only the 2019-2020 campaign bucked the trend, seeing Liverpool pick up the title instead.

No previous team had managed to win the title four times in a row since the English top-flight had been created, which was testament to Guardiola’s skill as a manager. It was also due to the takeover of the club by Abu Dhabi, who turned it from perennial losers into the ultimate winnings machine. The obvious question to ask is: how?

The Perennial Losers

In 1878, a team known as Newton Heath LYR was formed in the area of Manchester it was named after. Two years later and another club was formed in the city, this take with the moniker of ‘St. Mark’s (West Gorton)’. The former club later became Manchester United, with the latter re-named to become Manchester City. It took City 19 years to win the club’s first honours, with came courtesy of the Second Division title in 1899. Five years on and the club won the FA Cup for the first time, defeating Crystal Palace in the final. They actually won the competition before Manchester United had managed it.

Even so, the reality of City is that they were seen as the second team in Manchester, especially when the Red Devils won the First Division in 1908 and then again in 1911, winning an FA Cup in 1909 to continue their success. It was City that would win the next title, doing so in 1937, but in the intervening years they had bobbled up and down between the First and Second Divisions, never quite being good enough or bad enough to settle in either. That is a fact that is perhaps best summed up by the knowledge that no time had won the Second Division title more than Man City until Leicester City overtook them at the end of the 2023-2024 season.

During the formative years of both the two football clubs and the very sport itself, Manchester City and Manchester United won a similar number of trophies to one another. For City, though, a fallow period was about to take over. The Cityzens won their last top-flight title in 1968, two years after their final Second Division title and a year before their last FA Cup win, with only the Football League wins of 1970 and 1976 breaking the drought. What followed were years of relegation out of the top-flight and the promotion back into it, as well as a relegation at the end of the 1997-1998 season down to the equivalent of League One.

The Arrival of the Abu Dhabi Group

The relegation from the Premier League down to what was League Two at the time saw City make some unwanted history, becoming just the second team after 1. FC Magdeburg to have won a European trophy and yet been relegated to their country’s third-tier league. As a result, the club underwent huge upheaval off the field, including a new chairman and a new manager. The club continued to bounce between leagues before eventually settling and enjoying some mid-table finishes, then in 2007 the former Prime Minister of Thailand, Thaksin Shinawatra, bought the club only for financial issues to hit him almost immediately.

Having previously had what are best-described as ‘political travails’, Shinawatra had his assets frozen, plunging Man City into crisis. This was seen as the perfect opportunity for the Abu Dhabi United Group to move in and take over the club, spearheaded by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan. Sheikh Mansour was, and remains, the Deputy Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates, also being the Vice-Chairman of the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, managing a portfolio of around £250 billion. It is believed that he gave the go-ahead for the £200 million takeover of Man City, which was around double what Shinawatra had paid for it a little over a year before.

Squad Investment

The first thing that the Abu Dhabi Group did after taking over Manchester City was to invest heavily in the squad. The club signed Robinho from Real Madrid for a British transfer record £32.5 million, as well as numerous other high-profile players, with little-to-no improvement to the squad. They finished tenth, spending another £100 million on players such as Gareth Barry, Kolo Touré and Carlos Tevez, as well as replacing Mark Hughes with Roberto Mancini in the December of 2009. They improved, finishing fifth in the league, but more money was poured into the playing staff as well as the local area in order to win over the support of Mancunians.

City reached the FA Cup final in 2011, which was the club’s first major final appearance in 30 years, defeating Manchester United on their way there and knocking their local rivals out of a competition for the first time since 1975. They won 1-0 against Stoke City, scoring the club’s first major piece of silverware since that 1976 League Cup win. On the final day of the Premier League season, meanwhile, the club finished third ahead of Arsenal in order to gain the final Champions League place, ensuring the club’s continued improvement and setting them up well to sign more, better players to work with Mancini.

Sportswashing to Victory?

The 2011-2012 season would go down as one of the most exciting in the history of the Premier League. The title battle between Manchester City and Manchester United went down to the final day, with the Red Devils at the top of the table when the full-time whistle went at the end of their game. City were still playing, however, and two goals in injury time saw them take over their neighbours in order to secure their first top-flight title since 1968 and their first Premier League title since the re-brand of the competition in 1992. The club was very much back in the big-time, with another seven titles to follow between then and 2023-2024.

Collection of Trophies

With FA Cup wins also added to the trophy cabinet in 2011, 2019 and 2023, as well as six League Cups, briefly putting them level with Liverpool for the record before the Merseyside club won more, the only title that had really evaded City was the Champions League. That changed in 2023 when Pep Guardiola finally won the competition, having missed out two years prior. For Manchester City fans, the Abu Dhabi era has been a glorious one, seeing the club not only compete with the big boys but overtake them. For everyone else, though, it has been the ‘Sportswashing Era‘, with everything City have won since the takeover being tainted.

Financial Misconduct Taints Wins

City fans would obviously suggest that that is just down to jealously, pointing to the idea of City breaking apart the monopoly of the teams who dominated football for decades. Supporters of the likes of Liverpool and Manchester United, meanwhile, would point to the fact that City were punished by UEFA, only being saved by the fact that some of the club’s misdemeanours were time-barred and therefore overruled by the Court of Arbitration for Sport. At the time of writing, we await the outcome of the 115 charges of financial misconduct that the Premier League has put on City, which would paint their achievements in a whole new light. For many at the Etihad, though, they simply don’t care.