A few hours after Liverpool owner John W Henry first set foot inside Anfield, exactly 16 years ago, he sat among football writers in the boardroom and told us that financial sustainability rules in football were necessary because ‘I don’t have “Sheikh” in front of my name.’ The former commodities trader didn’t count on his biggest Abu Dhabi adversary having no such title at all.
In some ways, butter doesn’t melt when it comes to Manchester City chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak. He is the individual with whom some top-level City players have communicated over the years, going over the head of City’s aloof and socially awkward chief executive Ferran Soriano with WhatsApp messages detailing their personal gripes. Mubarak never changed his mobile number, which made him accessible, though he has avoided direct intervention in squabbles.
The affability encapsulates how the suave 50-year-old with wardrobes of impeccable suits has become one of the most powerful non-royals in Abu Dhabi. A man who is friends with some of the planet’s wealthiest and most powerful businesspeople, including the formidable BlackRock titan Larry Fink and Hollywood, wrestling and UFC dealmaker Ari Emanuel. People tell you he has a sense of humour. ‘He has a light side. He’s good company,’ says one source.
At a glitzy evening event held in Mubarak’s honour at New York’s Mandarin Oriental hotel in the autumn of 2024, Fink handed him an award and declared him to be a financial visionary. Mubarak apparently basked in the audience’s acclaim, so you would never have known that across the Atlantic, City were actually in the throes of an arbitration case that threatened to trash his and Abu Dhabi’s reputation.
‘He just never imagined the outcome. He didn’t see it as possible,’ says one former City executive who has worked with Mubarak and professes to have respect for him. ‘You can trust him. You never knew where you were with Ferran but even when the atmosphere at the club became unpleasant under the Spanish clique, Khaldoon was approachable.’
There was a time when Mubarak would also look British sports journalists in the eye, receiving the Manchester City press corps in the chairman’s lounge at the Etihad and talking for an hour or more off the record. It was at one such gathering that he revealed Neymar’s entourage had apparently said, when City tried to sign him from Santos in 2012, that the forward would need new footwear capable of enabling him to keep his footing on the Premier League’s muddy pitches. Mubarak saw the funny side. City immediately withdrew from the race to sign the Brazilian.
Manchester City chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak has become one of the most powerful non-royals in Abu Dhabi
He has been invited into the inner sanctum of Abu Dhabi’s Al Nahyan clan, the six brothers including City owner Sheikh Mansour (right) known as the ‘Bani Fatima’
He is the man with whom top-level City players communicated over the years, going over the head of chief executive Ferran Soriano with WhatsApp messages detailing personal gripes
Those informal conversations became sparser as UEFA began investigating City for breaching financial spending rules. But the fact that he was comfortable sitting down with a British football pack was viewed as extraordinary and impressive in Abu Dhabi, where there is no such accountability and putting yourself forward in such a way does not come naturally.
While the scions of Abu Dhabi’s ruling Al Nahyan dynasty are stiff and uncomfortable with public attention, he, with his excellent American English, honed while studying finance at Boston’s Tufts University, was their link to the outside world. It cemented his standing among them.
Mubarak always did have one foot inside the all-powerful clan. He and his brother Mohamed were effectively adopted by the royal court after their father, a senior Emirati diplomat, was assassinated on a street outside his residence in Paris by Palestinian terrorists when Mubarak was eight. His brother now heads Abu Dhabi’s Department of Culture and Tourism.
But as head of the colossal Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, Mubadala, Mubarak has been welcomed to the inner sanctum led by the six Al Nahyan brothers – including City owner Sheikh Mansour – known as the ‘Bani Fatima’, or ‘sons of Fatima’, after their mother, a favourite wife of Sheikh Zayed, the UAE founding father. Fatima, the ‘mother of the nation’ is still alive.
Mubarak has driven a vision to make Abu Dhabi a cultural capital and put Gulf rivals Dubai and Qatar in the shade, while overseeing returns which have seen Mubadala’s assets grow to a value of $330billion (£250bn). He accompanies the Abu Dhabi president on state visits and he, rather than the ruling Sheikh, is Abu Dhabi’s representative on Donald Trump’s Board of Peace, plotting Gaza’s post-war transition.
The purchase of City was seen as part of the same cultural soft power play. ‘We are acknowledging that how we are handling this project is telling a lot to the world about how we are,’ Khaldoon said in a rare interview, with The Guardian, in 2009. ‘Manchester City is showing the world the true essence of who Abu Dhabi is and what Abu Dhabi is about.’ Excruciating words in retrospect.
As immensely powerful VIPs whose money talks, people like Mubarak are used to getting their own way. Year after year, money managers and financiers beat a path to their door, desperate to sit down with them in the lobby of Abu Dhabi‘s Four Seasons hotel and get just a sliver of that petroleum wealth to invest. It was an entirely alien concept to have UEFA and the Premier League with their financial spending rules imposing rules, censuring and imposing penalties on them.
Mubarak’s words to City legal counsel Simon Cliff after UEFA first penalised City in 2014, exposed by a hacked email, are now legendary. ‘Khaldoon said he would rather spend £30million on the 50 best lawyers in the world to sue them for the next 10 years,’ said Cliff.
Mubarak (right) accompanies the Abu Dhabi president on state visits and he, rather than the ruling Sheikh, is Abu Dhabi’s representative on the Donald Trump’s Board of Peace
Introducing David Cameron (second left) and Xi Jinping (right) to former City player Sun Jihai (second right) in 2015 on the Chinese premier’s state visit to the UK
Mubarak has a long-standing relationship with Prime Minister Andy Burnham, dating back to the latter’s days as Manchester mayor when City were investing in the city’s development
Though Mubarak is genuinely popular in Abu Dhabi – ‘the good guy’ as one source puts it – there is a ruthless streak behind the smooth exterior. Rules, regulations, moral consequences and the little people have seemed immaterial at times, as the sovereign wealth fund has pursued vast financial returns.
In Colombia, where Melissa Moncada, a former beauty pageant queen, smoothed the way for Abu Dhabi, Mubadala provoked huge protest after buying the rights to exploit gold in the Andes mountains. Despite fears of a threat to the water supplies of two million people, Mubadala maintained its push for gold. It eventually brought in Canada’s Aris Mining as a partner and has now sold out to them.
Mubarak has managed to avoid the heat amid these flashpoints and other controversies that have dogged Abu Dhabi. Including claims – strongly denied by the Emirate – that the UAE has armed a faction in Sudan’s civil war that the US has accused of genocide.
Though Manchester City is a minor entity by comparison, the global reputational damage to Abu Dhabi will be far bigger if their appeal against the independent commission’s overwhelming guilty verdict fails. Mubarak risks handing Qatar, a long-reviled neighbour, a propaganda coup.
Kristian Ulrichsen, fellow for the Middle East at the Baker Institute, told the Financial Times that the reputational impact on Mubarak could be worse than any of the previous controversies. ‘This will probably go global in a way that nothing else has and will associate Abu Dhabi with a club that was systematically cheating,’ he said. That piece described this moment as Mubarak’s ‘toughest test’.
Is he ruffled? It is impossible to know. He has not been seen in public or issued one of his customary CityTV crisis messages in the past two weeks, and Soriano faced the music. But though the Gulf dynasties particularly abhor loss of face, the catastrophe of a lost appeal is unlikely to see him defenestrated.
The ensuing national humiliation would still be overshadowed by the size and significance of the wealth fund Mubarak presides over. Moreover, sources stress out that it is not clear whether Mubarak made the ultimate decision to funnel £830m into City in ways now deemed nefarious.
It is important to consider, they say, that the directives and orders of the autocratic Al Nahyans brook no dissent, even when someone of Mubarak’s immense standing is receiving them. It is quite possible that those above Mubarak made the fateful decisions which could doom City and that Mubarak had to put those instructions into effect. The lines between business and the state are blurred in Abu Dhabi, in a way not considered dubious as in the west.
With FIFA president Gianni Infantino at the Etihad in January 2025
Should City lose and face one or more relegations, it will no doubt be Mubarak (left) who has to front up. He will perform the task expertly. And then he’ll move on
The Al Nahyans, even Sheikh Mansour, have barely been seen around British football. Had they pressed for a particular course of action, they would have had no innate feel for the environment they were dealing with. Soriano, who features far more in the independent commission documents, seems more vulnerable than Mubarak, though sources suggest that even his dismissal is not a certainty, given how much store Abu Dhabi sets by loyalty and long service.
Simon Pearce, the long-standing special adviser to the Abu Dhabi executive, whose name is all over the hacked documents, was revealed by The Mail on Sunday in 2016 as Abu Dhabi’s point man in a PR campaign to blacken Qatar’s reputation, through a £60,000-a-month contract with London political lobbying firm Quiller Consultants. That, too, was a deeply embarrassing episode. But Pearce remains in place because those in power rate him.
Should City lose their appeal and face one or more relegations, there will be very many football fans and City staff to answer to, and with his usual air of sophistication, it will no doubt be Mubarak who is left to put on one of his many suits and front up. He will perform the task expertly.
And then, with that $330billion of money under investment, the Gaza Board of Peace, overseas state visits and myriad other projects to think about, he will move on.
