A week is a long time... in football

Paul Ellis/AFP/ Getty Images 

Rock and a hard place: Andy Burnham, above with City chair Khaldoon Al Mubarak, 

needs to mollify an ally which could cost his credibility.

Six-page special report on Man City

Since the City verdict, the stakes have rapidly escalated, writes Rory Smith

‘Burnham is the man to have to resist them but does not seem to have the answer’

Rory Smith

4 Oct 2026 - THE OBSERVER / Sport

Things used to be so innocent. It is hard to remember, now, but there was a time – not really so long ago – when football was a simple game. Jumpers for goalposts. Flying wingers. Arsenal’s blitz offence at corners. Four-minute delays as we crossed to Stockley Park to discover if Enzo Fernández was offside.

It seems like only last week, for example, that Manchester City were overwhelmingly found guilty of breaching the Premier League’s financial rules on an industrial scale; it feels like just a few days ago that the independent panel that heard the case published its core decision, at last exposing to sunlight what appears to be the greatest cheating scandal in the English game’s history.

Somehow, everything that has happened since then has not only had the effect of stretching the last week into an aeon, but has turned that blissful period when all we had to worry about was the effect of City’s disgrace on the continued viability of the Premier League as a sporting competition into something approaching a halcyon age.

How naive we were. Since the Premier League published the panel’s “final award” on Tuesday – subject to appeal, City strenuously protest their innocence, comprehensive body of irrefutable proof etcetera – the case has broken containment. Somehow, what all of this means for the Premier League is now the least of our worries.

We have known for some time, of course, that football is important. The Premier League is important. The game is the last great collective cultural form, the one shared global obsession that cannot be completely fractured by algorithms, and England’s top flight – by hook and often by crook – sits at the sharp end of that. It ranks among this country’s greatest soft-power exports. What we could not have grasped, not fully, until the shockwaves of the City case started to ripple out, was just how central it had become, how deeply enmeshed it had grown with politics, with the economy, with diplomacy.

Football has always been treated as a sideshow, a distraction from all the things that really matter. It turns out it is the thing that matters.

There have, over the last week, been two timelines. The first is the sporting one. The panel’s overall verdict – finding City guilty of all but one of the hundred-plus they faced, ranging from non-cooperation to disguising the source of some of their commercial funding – landed last Friday.

City released a terse statement. The club’s chairman, Khaldoon Al Mubarak, released a slightly more detailed one on Saturday.

On Tuesday, the publication of the panel’s findings revealed just how scathing the decision was, just how deep the offences ran. Many of City’s commercial arrangements, they determined, were shams. They accused some of the club’s witnesses of knowingly misrepresenting information, a legalese euphemism for lying.

There were statements from the Premier League and the club. Ferran Soriano, City’s CEO, sent a video to club staff in which he spoke for three minutes without blinking. On Thursday evening, City lodged their formal appeal.

On Friday, amid another blizzard of statements, they confirmed they had done so.

All of that might have been anticipated. It followed a recognisable pattern: claim and counterclaim, call and response, albeit one that had at its heart something that felt like an existential matter for the league itself.

More startling was the constant buzzing of the second timeline. Not the guesswork about how City might appeal, or the panting speculation about how they might be punished, or the constant bleating about the rules preventing owners investing in football, but the rapid escalation in the stakes: a controversy that has its roots in enabling a football team to sign Eliaquim Mangala suddenly metastasising into a full-blown international incident.

Etihad Airways, City’s anchor sponsor, started things off, threatening to sue the Premier League for bringing its good name into disrepute by suggesting that it might have been involved in the so-called “Disguised Funding Scheme”. The company has, it has been suggested, retained the famously aggressive Quinn Emanuel for their counter-attack.

By the end of the week, even that seemed like small fry: Bloomberg was reporting that officials in the United Arab Emirates had warned the decision might affect bilateral trade with the United Kingdom, while the Telegraph suggested that the country might pull investment from a high-tech corridor between Oxford and Cambridge that might eventually be worth £78 billion to the British economy.

Downing Street had, reportedly, “not denied” that the funding might be at stake.

Those threats, of course, raise a number of questions: why would the UAE respond so furiously at the prospect of a club it has always said it does not own being punished? And why would an autocratic regime unaccustomed to being held accountable feel the need to be so aggressive when City, famously, have a comprehensive body of irrefutable proof of their innocence?

Thus far, the man who would have to resist them, the prime minister, does not seem to have been able to come up with an answer to this.

His first intervention on the subject seemed to linger longer than might have been expected on his belief that Everton, found guilty of much more minor offences a few years ago, were harshly treated. He then suggested that he would be “concerned” at the prospect of “losing” City’s owners, given all they have done for Manchester.

He later clarified those comments – not once, but twice – but his vulnerability on the issue is now plain to see. He will know now that his initial remarks misread the public mood. He will know, too, that this is now not merely a Premier League issue.

Dame Meg Hillier, chair of the Treasury Select Committee, has asked HMRC to investigate the potential tax implications of City’s financial sleight of hand; Liam Byrne, chair of the House of Commons’ business committee, has requested the Financial Reporting Council to look into what might constitute a “serious failure of scrutiny” from City’s auditors.

That leaves Burnham in an invidious position, caught between the need to mollify an ally and a growing sense that doing so would not only cost him his credibility but might even paint the country as a whole as powerless to stand up to the absolutist monarchy of a petro-state.

The Premier League has long been how Britain has presented itself to the world. What happens now will be a test of how the world sees Britain.

***

Amit Lennon Photography - Old vs new: Roy Evans (right); 

Leanne Donnelly (far right) in front of her Lunch Box cafe in Ancoats.

Look at Manchester, no wonder Burnham is torn

Prime minister was mayor during gentrification but the future is uncertain.

‘My brother was a keen kayaker. The canals around here were part of a network called the Cheshire Loop. He said it was where you could not canoe on your own’ 

   - Roy Evans

‘Apparently the cafe’s getting torn down, but I’ve heard it so often that I’ll believe it when it’s definitely happening. I can cook bacon and eggs anywhere’ 

   - Leanne Donnelly

Burnham praised the club owners’ role in building the modern Manchester

4 Oct 2026 - THE OBSERVER / Sport

By Rory Smith

The pencil hovers over the sketchpad delicately perched on Roy Evans’s knees as he sits in a foldable camping chair, considering the angles of the painstakingly restored saw-tooth roof of Stubbs Mill.

Evans will happily draw anything – his book is filled with country churches, stone bridges, grand facades – on his weekly outings with the Manchester division of a group known as the Urban Sketchers. “It’s a bit like Hell’s Angels, in that it’s a movement with chapters all over the world,” he says. This is probably where the similarities end.

His favourites, though, are generally places like Stubbs Mill, originally a Victorian factory producing machines for the cotton trade but revived over the past decade as the European headquarters of Fanatics, the global sports merchandise behemoth. “I like that contrast between the old and the new,” he says.

Ancoats and New Islington were once the flywheel of the Industrial Revolution, but by the end of the 20th century they had fallen into disrepair, the mills abandoned, the warehouses derelict, the chimneys that had belched black smoke into the air long since extinguished.

It was not, at that stage, the sort of place where someone might sit on a street corner and idly doodle. “My brother was a keen kayaker,” Evans says. “The canals around here were part of a network called the Cheshire Loop. He said this was the only part of it where you couldn’t canoe on your own.”

The change in the past 10 years is absolute. Sleek apartment blocks have sprung up along wharfs filled with swans and narrowboats. The mills and the warehouses have been repointed, revamped, repurposed as co-working spaces and pilates studios, wastelands transformed into green spaces, a place that was once a theme park for postindustrial decay turned into an advert for 21st-century urbanism.

There is no shortage of developments like this around the world. Cotton Field Wharf, Smith’s Yard and the rest are not markedly different from Coal Drops Yard or Paddington Basin in London, Chelsea Market in New York or Fitzroy in Melbourne: the same redbrick chic, the same coffee shops selling Jambon-Beurres at £6 a pop. The stylistic hegemony is so great that the Qatari authorities built one, Msheireb, for the 2022 World Cup, skipping the “industrial” bit in “post-industrial” in the process.

What distinguishes the regenerated streets of Ancoats and New Islington, of course, is their broader significance. It is precisely the sort of project, blending the old and new, the public and private, that symbolises the enigmatic political philosophy that has come to be known as Manchesterism and swept Andy Burnham from the city’s mayor to the post of prime minister.

They are also the primary fruits of the union between the city of Manchester and the owners of Manchester City. Manchester Life, a joint venture between the council and Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG), the private-equity vehicle that owns the club, has developed six apartment buildings – all within a short walk of each other – since acquiring the land in 2014. That investment has long attracted criticism and controversy. Although the development provided almost 1,500 homes, none of them were classified as affordable housing in a city with an urgent need for it. Instead, about a quarter were made available for sale, with the rest assigned as rental properties.

In 2019, the Sunday Times reported that none of that income went to the council. A 2022 study by a team from the University of Sheffield found that, instead, they were directed to holding companies registered in Jersey. They suggested that, by leasing the land necessary for the developments to ADUG at less than market rate, the council had signed a “bad deal” for Manchester, transferring “public wealth to private hands”.

The council has always rejected that characterisation, telling the Guardian this week that it had been “debunked” several times, choosing instead to focus on not just the tax income from the developments but the impact they have had on a forlorn part of the city.

Burnham echoed that stance this week when he praised the role the club’s owners have played in building the modern Manchester. At one point – before a hurried clarification from his press office – the prime minister almost seemed to quote the banner that has long hung from one of the stands at the Etihad Stadium: “Manchester thanks you, Sheikh Mansour.”

Walking around the developments, there is little doubt about the difference it has made. “A lot of it down there was wasteland for ages,” said Leanne Donnelly, the owner of the Ancoats Lunch Box, a cafe almost exactly halfway between the wharfs and the Etihad Campus, the vast tract of land contiguous to the stadium that houses City’s training facilities, as well as stadiums for its youth and women’s teams and, most recently, the black box of the Co-Op Live concert venue.

Under this ownership, City have done no little community work, but there should be no illusion that Manchester Life is part of it. It is a real-estate investment, a business opportunity. Still: nobody disputes that it has been beneficial. “You can feel the change,” Donnelly said.

The impact, though, is not even. Gentrification has yet to arrive in Donnelly’s part of Ancoats. She receives occasional letters – and, more frequently, spots announcements in the Manchester Evening News – telling her that one plan or another is going to transform the area, whether they are linked to City’s owners or not.

“There’s one that is meant to have a lido,” she said. “Apparently the cafe’s getting torn down, but I’ve heard it so often that I’ll believe it when I’m told it’s definitely happening.” She does not seem especially concerned by any of it. “I can cook bacon and eggs anywhere.”

She has seen benefits to the development going on near, if not exactly around, her. Some have been direct – “we got the workers when they built the Asda, and the tram, and the stadium, and the arena” – and some probably classify as ancillary. “It’s nice to hear the noise when City score,” she said, slightly grudgingly (her family loyalties lie elsewhere). “And I got to hear Take That for free.”

But for the time being at least, this part of the city is not Burnham’s Manchester or Abu Dhabi’s Manchester: it is, instead, an in-between sort of a place, full of garages and scrapyards and low-slung prefabs housing electrical wholesalers, waiting – nervously, excitedly – for someone else’s sketch of the future to be imposed on it.