Inside Man City’s vicious 15-year legal war with football’s ‘cartel’: How City and their attack-dog lawyer fought amid a culture of fear that saw journalists targeted for reporting the truth – and club’s shock at guilty verdict, revealed by IAN HERBERT

There’s no suggestion that the tracking device found under a UEFA investigator’s car, at the height of a forensic investigation into Manchester City’s finances, had anything to do with the club under suspicion.  

But it was an emblem of the tension and paranoia at the heart of an extraordinary, unremitting 15-year war which has concluded with the Premier League finding the club guilty on all but one of 115 charges. 

The device was found when the independent forensic accountant, recruited by UEFA to assist investigators poring over hacked emails which suggested City were involved in Gulf state-sponsored strategies to cheat football financial rules, had his car taken in for service. The matter was not pursued. ‘But everyone was on edge,’ says one source familiar with the inquiry. ‘It felt like warfare.’

UEFA were not the only ones who have felt besieged and threatened by City, who have brought immense legal and financial muscle to counter suggestions that they cheated football’s financial rules. 

The Premier League have always known that their case is strong but have been unable to provide so much as a deep background briefing on the case’s progress, knowing that City could publicly accuse them of manipulation. 

A section of the club’s fanbase has repeatedly insulted and attacked journalists who suggested there were grounds for conviction. One reporter who questioned City had a brick put through a window of his property. Those who posed questions and were sceptical about City’s conduct are vindicated today.

The club did not exude such aggression in the early days of Abu Dhabi ownership in 2008 when, under the leadership of former chief executive Garry Cook and his executive team, they were likeable and approachable. 

The club boldly took on football agents like Kia Joorabchian who wanted a high level of involvement in their transfer business and responded very badly to Cook’s insistence that he – and not outsiders – would be driving transfer negotiations from now on.

The Abu Dhabi state’s strategic communications executive, Simon Pearce, who was sent in to help the new ‘City project’, was charm personified, in November 2009, as he mingled with journalists on the touchline of a floodlit football pitch created in the garden of Abu Dhabi’s seven-star Emirates Palace hotel. 

City’s sponsorship deal with Abu Dhabi state-run mobile telephone company Etisalat – hugely contentious and central to allegations of cheating, as things would turn out – had just been announced. This was commercial ‘low hanging fruit,’ Pearce said, beaming, at the start of City’s mid-season winter tour of the state.

City were patronised and mocked by those who considered them upstarts but with excellent executives like Cook, Brian Marwood, Jon Stemp and Mark Allan around, they brushed off the insults. 

The club’s recruitment team ignored the bare-faced contempt of agent Dimitri Seluk, who represented Yaya Toure. ‘Manchester City?’ Seluk scoffed after one City executive arrived at his hotel room in Rome, in 2009, trying to negotiate the player’s move from Barcelona. ‘Why should he sign for you?’ Toure proved a steal at £24million.

But in the face of the seemingly unlimited spending capacity of the Abu Dhabis and Russian billionaires like Chelsea’s Roman Abramovich, Michel Platini’s UEFA announced plans for new cost-control regulations which would prevent owners from piling cash in. The Premier League began formulating their own controls.

City and the Abu Dhabis were indignant – feeling they were being constrained by a self-serving establishment at precisely the time they were trying to bring something modern and progressive to football. 

But it was after Cook was replaced by Spaniard Ferran Soriano in 2009 that the club became a more combative and joyless place and the club lost many friends in football. In 2014, UEFA found City guilty of breaching Financial Fair Play rules – imposing a small fine and transfer market restrictions. The club were not chastened in the slightest.

City continued to seek ways of navigating a course around the financial rules imposed on them. Amid the subsequent legal challenge which led to the Premier League’s 115 charges, City’s lawyer, Simon Cliff, insisted this battle against British football be called ‘Project Longbow’ in tribute to the weapon the English used to beat the French at Crecy and Agincourt.

City were being accused of disguising state income as sponsorship deals to flood the club’s transfer kitty with cash. One email, from Pearce to a ‘Mohamed’, said that the ‘annual obligation’ for Abu Dhabi sponsor Aabar was £3million a year and that ‘the remaining £12m requirement will come from alternative sources provided by His Highness’. 

Another from Pearce to the chief executive of state-run Etihad Airlines detailed a £99m sponsorship commitment from the company – ‘of which you will provide £8m’. These emails were sent without the remotest awareness that a Portuguese computer hacker, Rui Pinto, would discover them and make them public in November 2018 on a platform called ‘Football Leaks’.

When The Independent revealed how they had ‘sold’ the image rights of players to a company called ‘Fordham’ for £24.5m – despite still taking earnings for those rights – the club demanded the report’s removal and an apology that the title must tweet. An unprecedented level of ‘contrition’. 

A 1,500-word defence of the story was sent to the club by return and nothing more was heard. Football Leaks later confirmed that story. ‘Fordham’ was an Abu Dhabi entity.

Soriano ensured that others within the club adopted a harsher and far more confrontational tone. A string of Spaniards followed him into senior management roles at City, creating a Spanish clique. 

City’s British executives joked that you needed to be an FOF (‘Friend of Ferran’) or else be considered valuable by the Abu Dhabis, if you wanted to keep your job. There were moves from Soriano to shift club lawyer Cliff out indefinitely to Melbourne City FC, one of the new sister clubs in the growing ‘City Football Group’ Soriano was creating. Cliff resisted and his value to the Abu Dhabi owners kept him in position.

Cliff took the heat as one of the most aggressive exponents of ‘Project Longbow’ – especially when an email from the Football Leaks cache, which had been sent by him, suggested pleasure being taken in the death of one of the seven members of UEFA’s ‘investigatory chamber’ which was investigating City. ‘One down, six to go,’ Cliff joked to colleagues.

It was the low-profile Soriano who drove City’s aggression – seemingly impervious to how widely unpopular it would make the club among many within British football. Cliff, an urbane and popular individual among City’s longer-standing executives, was tasked with doing the work. 

One source describes Cliff as the legal equivalent of a GP within the club, referring aspects of City’s growing and multi-faceted legal battle with the football authorities to specialists in many fields of the law.

City’s Manchester-based team viewed the football authorities as a cartel, intent on nobbling City, a nimble, excellent competitor who had reimagined player acquisition and built the best training complex in the world to help recruit stars. But the Abu Dhabis’ fury had a more geopolitical motivation.

The Gulf state had bought the club as a vehicle to enhance its reputation across the globe. It was the indignity of being found guilty of fraudulent accounting, a very bad look, which maddened them, and most particularly the power behind owner Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al Nahyan’s throne – club chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak.

Al Mubarak has been the individual with whom some of the top-level City players have communicated over the years, going over the head of Soriano with WhatsApp messages detailing their personal gripes. 

Al Mubarak has never changed his mobile number, making him accessible, though he has avoided direct intervention in squabbles, reluctant to get into the weeds of a club which represents no more than ten per cent of his role as overseer and distributor of the Gulf state’s immense petro-chemical wealth. He delegates completely to Soriano.

Where the financial investigations are concerned, though, it’s been a different story. When UEFA first began pursuing City in 2014, Al Mubarak told club executives that he ‘would rather spend £30m on the best 50 lawyers in the world and sue them (UEFA) for the next 10 years than agree to a financial penalty’. He’s seen it as his mission to fight this.

Insiders describe Al Mubarak as a deeply patriotic Emirati, whose loyalty to the Gulf state is borne of background. His father served as the UAE’s ambassador to Paris, where he was assassinated in 1984, at the age of 36, as he left his apartment building a few hundred yards from the Eiffel Tower. The lone gunman was never caught. For Al Mubarak, fighting UEFA and the Premier League has been a matter of national pride.

It was he who led the fight for City in 2018, four years after the UEFA conviction, when the publication of the hacked emails led the same governing body to open a new investigation. 

This time, the club refused to supply documents, make witnesses available and even went to court to challenge UEFA’s right to charge them. 

‘The request for the most basic piece of information from City became a form of warfare,’ says the source familiar with that inquiry, which spanned six months. ‘They were operating with virtually unlimited wealth. There was no limit to the number of lawyers they can engage.’

UEFA concluded that City had disguised £204m in cash injections from Abu Dhabi state funds, by pretending that the cash came from sponsors, and in 2020 banned them from European competition for two seasons. 

City were so confident of appealing the decision that they didn’t even bother contesting the ban. The Court of Arbitration in Sport upheld the club’s appeal. Some of the alleged malpractice had taken place too far into the past and UEFA could not provide enough information to build on the leaked emails.

When the Premier League’s own investigation saw 115 more charges levelled against them in February 2023, City ratcheted up the warfare. More than 50 charges related to sponsorship deals. Others related to alleged disguised, off-the-books salary payments to football staff like manager Roberto Mancini and Toure, made to persuade them to sign.

It took the Premier League nearly five years to complete the investigation which led them to charge the club. City’s refusal to cooperate over that time led the league to take them to court to force them to give evidence. 

That would have remained a secret had Daily Mail Sport’s publishers, Associated Newspapers, not gone to court to seek the right to report it. Associated’s barrister, Jude Bunting KC, won that argument, after going up against Lord Pannick KC, who would lead City’s defence team in ‘the 115’ case.

Sir Stephen Males, one of the High Court judges that heard the Associated case, drew attention to City’s refusal to cooperate. ‘It is surprising, and a matter of legitimate public concern, that so little progress has been made after two-and-a-half years – during which, it may be noted, the club has twice been crowned as Premier League champions,’ he said.

Before the six-week ‘115’ case even opened, City sought to damage the Premier League’s credibility by mounting a separate legal challenge against the system of rules governing sponsorship deals. They sent seven lawyers from the Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer firm in to fight that case.

When the panel hearing that earlier case found that the Premier League’s system was fundamentally sound, with several rules in need of correction, City nonetheless claimed victory and accused the league of communicating a dubious interpretation. 

Cliff was sent on the attack. He declared in an email to all 19 other clubs that City would take further legal action and that they, not the Premier League, would help interpret the verdict for them if they needed help. Other clubs found this deeply patronising.

The details of the earlier case revealed the extraordinary financial complexity of the Abu Dhabi sponsorship deals that ‘the 115’ panel would have to grapple with. 

City had submitted a 600-page document to get their Etihad Airways sponsorship deal approved. Premier League staff worked weekends and into the early hours to get through the detail before rejecting City’s arithmetic. The league were clearly facing a legal and intellectual onslaught from a hugely oppressive and immensely argumentative club.

A few days after ‘the 115’ hearing had finished, a senior figure at the Premier League indicated to Daily Mail Sport that City had swamped the proceedings with mountains of evidence on the sponsorship deals. ‘You will see this when the verdict comes,’ said that figure.

But one former City executive, who would have seen the controversial sponsorship transactions at first hand before leaving the club, had felt sure that the Premier League would be unable to prove a ‘deliberate’ attempt to deceive and would only find City guilty of a refusal to cooperate – enabling the club to avoid a points deduction. It now looks as if that optimism was misplaced.

There has been a hope among some in football that the verdict in this case can finally bring nearly a decade of warfare between the Premier League and Manchester City to a close. 

‘It’s a shadow on the wall at every board meeting. The constant sense of war is damaging and suffocating,’ says one Premier League club board member. 

Now, we must wait to see if Al Mubarak and Soriano green light a legal challenge and line-by-line rebuttals of the findings. The battle is over, but the war which has been such a stain on British football’s reputation for fair play may well go on.