In the small talk preceding one of the few interviews he has ever granted to the British press, Manchester City chief executive Ferran Soriano joked to us about how he didn’t need to impress journalists as much in this role as he did in Spain, during five years as an executive at Barcelona.
The Spanish press were his route to Barca’s members, or socios, who vote the club president in every four years, Soriano explained, in a hotel meeting room overlooking New York. ‘But in Britain, you’re less interested in people like me.’
Little did he know. In the Copenhagen auditorium where European football club chiefs had gathered on Tuesday, Soriano found himself confronted by Sky’s Rob Harris and facing one of the vanishingly few moments when City can’t explain themselves through pre-prepared club videos.
‘I have nothing to say, thank you,’ said Soriano, who seemed to imagine that turning his back on the reporter would do the job. But Harris, one of the most indefatigable journalists on the long road to Tuesday’s City judgment, kept at it. Soriano scratched his nose, picked up his bag and left.
Confronting Soriano has been one of the few means of reaching behind the highly polished City veil. The BBC’s Dan Roan has approached him this way several times, too.
And though the 59-year-old stares ahead implacably each time, his job is the one that looks most vulnerable if City’s appeal fails. For a long time now, people have been very ‘interested’ in him.
Though Abu Dhabi and the court of its Crown Prince are at the heart of what the Premier League’s explosive verdict has described as almost £900million in ‘sham’ revenues, Soriano’s prints are certainly on some of the key documents which led to the verdicts.
Manchester City chief executive Ferran Soriano’s job looks vulnerable if City’s appeal against the Premier League fails
Rob Harris of Sky confronted Soriano in Copenhagen this week but was brushed off by the City executive
When there was a concern about City failing Financial Fair Play rules after forking out £9.9million to sack Roberto Mancini in 2013, it was Soriano, according to hacked documents published by German newspaper Der Spiegel, who suggested their Abu Dhabi sponsors cover off the heavy cost by paying City the pre-agreed bonus for winning the FA Cup in 2013… even though they lost to Wigan Athletic in the final.
City chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak entered that email exchange, proposing that ‘we could do a backdated deal for the next two years, paid up front’. When chief financial officer Jorge Chumillas questioned whether the backdating suggestion would be possible, another leading executive, Simon Pearce replied: ‘Of course. We can do what we want.’
It was Soriano who sent an email, also published by Der Spiegel, that stated City needed to fight Financial Fair Play but must ‘do it in a way that is not visible, or we will be pointed out as the global enemies of football’.
Soriano’s monotone video statement to City employees on Tuesday, declaring that the financial impropriety the club have been found guilty of ‘could not happen, did not happen’, even led to some on social media inaccurately speculating it was AI generated, partly because he does not blink once during the three-minute speech.
For City staff wondering what the future holds, it was miserably short on encouraging detail.
‘Bank statements, money transfers and witnesses’ would put things right, Soriano said, raising the inconvenient question of why, if such documents actually exist, no one had thought to present them to the commission panel in the first place.
It seems safe to say that few around the Etihad Stadium will be asking Soriano any challenging questions at the watercooler, given the uncompromising and difficult reputation he has always carried among the troops at the club. His predecessor Garry Cook, who presided over four years of ‘sham’, was at least personable.
But Soriano was detached, aloof and when he recruited a cadre of Spanish executives – a club within a club – some of the British employees were left feeling like outsiders. As Pep Guardiola arrived with his own Spanish entourage, it was a Spanish clique, in which being a Spanish speaker helped.
City’s British executives joked that that you needed to be an FOF (‘Friend of Ferran’) or be considered of direct value to the Abu Dhabis, if you wanted to keep your job at City.
Soriano’s unblinking three-minute video speech to City employees led some fans to inaccurately speculate it was AI-generated
Soriano alongside City chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak after the club’s Champions League triumph in 2023
Soriano certainly has a high sense of his own business acumen and had a book published on how to excel in football management, entitled ‘Goal’, three years before arriving at the Etihad.
The book’s subtitle, ‘The ball doesn’t go in by chance’, is an unfortunate one in retrospect for Soriano, who expounds within its pages on how you need to be one of the five or six biggest clubs in the world to get cut-through.
He cautions against cheating, telling the story of a British talent-spotter whom he found videoing an Under 13s game at Barca’s academy. After the individual was questioned at length, it emerged ‘he was gathering information for Liverpool FC’.
A cautionary tale, says Soriano, who also tells his readers to ‘limit risk’ – citing an obscure 13th century philosopher to reinforce the point. ‘The ability to make the right decision at the right point of the curve sorts the best people from the worst,’ Soriano advises. All immensely loaded in retrospect.
Those who have sat around the table with Soriano at Premier League board meetings describe an individual with great self-confidence whose belief he knows best has left smaller clubs feeling patronised.
‘Put a black pepperpot on the table and he’ll argue it’s white,’ says one executive. ‘He’s the one who thinks he’s moving the pawns around the table,’ says another.
His book came too early for Soriano to discuss his three years at the helm of Spanish airline Spanair from 2009, a year after leaving Barcelona. A plane crash at Madrid airport coupled with the effects of the 2008 financial crash left the company on its knees and it folded in 2012 with him still in charge.
Soriano was initially fined £8.6million for his role in the bankruptcy and banned from ‘managing other people’s wealth’ for two years, along with other board members, after they were found to have delayed filing for bankruptcy and continued issuing flight tickets as the company’s losses mounted.
But that court judgment was later overturned by judges who ruled there had been an intent to save the company from Soriano and his board members in the period before it went bust.
In New York, Soriano (pictured in 2013) foresaw only great things for himself and City. Now his future in football could be on the line
Now, he and his fellow City executives find themselves appealing the judgment of another adjudication panel and his future in football is on the line. In the New York hotel room, he foresaw only great things for himself and City.
We asked him that day in 2013 if he felt disquiet about the Financial Fair Play controls which established clubs like Manchester United, who had spent decades building up their business, seemed less vulnerable to.
‘You know, this is arguable,’ he said. ‘But from our perspective, we want to be sustainable. When a young boy or a marquee signing comes to our club, we want him to know there are some people who are going to tell him, “This is City, this is how we play, this is how we behave”.’
