Manchester City’s celebrity friends were weighing in to defend the club on Monday.The former Sun editor David Yelland, who co-hosts a podcast about doing good PR, alleged a confidentiality breach had cost the club ‘hundreds of millions’ in reputational damage. Liam Gallagher posted a foul-mouthed message about the ‘red cartel’.But there are reasons why the emergence of half the story, with proper detail still awaited, helps City, who have been found guilty of all substantive charges of the 115 brought by the Premier League. In the current hiatus, Abu Dhabi, whose club have denied all charges and may appeal, will be applying pressure on the UK Government and Prime Minister Andy Burnham about the risk to the Gulf state’s trade and investment with the UK, should public humiliation ensue.Abu Dhabi warned the UK in 2023 that a negative outcome to the 115 charges could damage relations with the UK. Beyond myriad obvious threats – the UAE is behind attempts to save struggling carmaker McLaren and expressing interest in spending a fortune on British defence technology – it has also been involved in the rejuvenation of a part of east Manchester, which helped burnish Burnham’s credentials in his nine years as the city region’s mayor.That apparent Abu Dhabi dependency in Manchester has brought rich praise for the Gulf state from Burnham in the past. ‘They are more than building a football club. They have been huge partners for the city and they have improved a lot of lives here,’ he said in 2023. ‘They are more than building a football club. They have been huge partners for the city and have improved a lot of lives here,’ Prime Minister Andy Burnham said of Abu Dhabi in 2023 Khaldoon Al Mubarak (right), the City chairman, is also chief executive of Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan’s mega-corporation MubadalaBurnham, who spoke by phone with Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan in July, will certainly know the powerful individuals the Premier League are up against.Khaldoon Al Mubarak, Manchester City chairman and chief executive of Bin Zayed’s mega-corporation Mubadala, which has assets of £290billion invested in businesses around the globe. Simon Pearce, who made his name at the public relations firm Burson-Marsteller before joining Team Abu Dhabi to advise on business possessions like City as well as matters of domestic and foreign policy.On the face of things, Burnham and Manchester owe Abu Dhabi for the transformation of inner-city areas like Ancoats and New Islington. But within the city itself, there is an alternative view.Many say those areas of Manchester were already changing, under a masterplan drawn up in the early 2000s by Manchester-based developer Urban Splash and architect Will Alsop, before the Abu Dhabis bought City in 2008. The local vision was for re-development which would include social housing so locals would not be priced out. The financial crash of 2008-10 saw the newly-arrived Abu Dhabi United Group – City’s owners – forming a partnership called ‘Manchester Life’ with Manchester City Council and taking over all the redevelopment.The story of what happened next is told in substantial detail by the writer and broadcaster Adrian Goldberg in his book Where’s the Money Gone? The Battle for the Soul of English Football. Goldberg details how the requirement for social housing was quietly dropped, making this an immensely lucrative, upmarket development for the Abu Dhabis. Taxpayer money had already done the ‘heavy lifting’ by preparing the polluted land for development. Mansour has now built around 1,500 homes in the area and takes rent.Who earns what has been shrouded in secrecy for years. But after a Freedom of Information request, the independent Manchester investigative news site The Mill revealed the council had granted Mansour first right of refusal – carte blanche – on all development sites in a huge area of land in Manchester. Weavers Quay and the Ancoats regeneration area of Manchester, which has been funded in large part by Abu Dhabi Manchester City celebrate winning the Premier League title – a competition they have dominated over the last decadeAnother Freedom of Information request, by the BBC, uncovered how Manchester city council received no rental income from Mansour’s Manchester Life until 2023/24, when it was paid £2.9million by them. Mansour’s companies had, by then, earned more than £39m from Manchester Life over a period of five years.Private developers, backed by independent academic analysis, are furious that land provided to Abu Dhabi by the council was not offered on the open market via a transparent tendering process. The council, which had been forced to cut £443m from its budget after 2010, was desperate for cash at that time. Goldberg cites an academic whose research shows the land was sold too cheaply by local politicians who were ‘wary of challenging’ the Abu Dhabis ‘in case it dampened Emirati enthusiasm for the football club’.This alternative narrative demonstrates that City’s owners’ arrival on Manchester’s property scene is not the story of altruism and beneficence that the club have always pressed home. The same can be said of the Al Nahyan dynasty’s UK investments in British children’s homes and special needs schools, detailed by the Daily Mail’s award-winning foreign correspondent Ian Birrell last year.Through Witherslack, a company owned by Mubadala, Abu Dhabi raked in £208m of revenue in 2024 by running 38 children’s homes, at a time when demand for special needs education had left English councils struggling to find places in state schools. One Witherslack school, Birrell showed, was charging up to £116,611 per pupil aged between five and 19 – almost double the fees for Eton – despite a witheringly negative Ofsted report. An aeriel view of the regenerated Ancoats and Islington Cotton Fields neighbourhood in Manchester Manager Pep Guardiola won four Premier League titles in a row and six in total during his time at Manchester CityThat is the state of play at what might be called the micro level. But the bigger picture looks different. The UK is struggling to find the money to develop in ways that are required. A report on the state of the nation’s infrastructure recently found that £258bn of public investment is needed. And in 2021, Britain struck a £10bn UAE commitment to invest.During David Cameron’s leadership of a Conservative government in 2015, Britain’s perceived failure to take a hard stance on a pro-Islam political group led the UAE to threaten a block on billion-pound arms deals. ‘The difficult conversations we’ve been having will become far more difficult,’ Al Mubarak warned the UK Government. It was a minor spat, compared with this one. The discussions with people he once lavished praise on look treacherous for Burnham.