Why Man City’s fourth straight Premier League win is an Abu Dhabi victory

The Premier League Trophy is coming home… to Abu Dhabi. Manchester City, owned by UAE Vice President Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed, won a record fourth straight Premier League title on Sunday, beating West Ham 3-1 in the final game of the season. City, as the club is known, is the first to clinch the champion title of English soccer’s top division four years in a row.

The team to beat in the U.K. is in many ways the UAE capital’s soccer team as well — from a business perspective at least. City is part of a multi-club ownership structure under City Football Group (CFG), owned by Sheikh Mansour and chaired by Mubadala CEO Khaldoon Al Mubarak.

Other board members include attorney Martin Edelman, who has served on the board of Abu Dhabi’s listed developer Aldar as well as an advisor to Mubadala; UAE communications fixer Simon Pearce; oil and gas executive John MacBeath; Alberto Galassi, CEO of Italian yacht builder Ferretti Group; and Abdulla Khouri, whose entertainment and events group, Ethara, puts on the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix each year.

Since coming under Sheikh Mansour’s ownership in 2008, when he bought the club for $254 million, City has become the fifth most valuable soccer team in the world, worth just shy of $5 billion — and notably had the highest revenue of any club last year, according to Forbes.

In 2019, American private equity firm Silver Lake invested $500 million for a 10% stake in CFG, and three years later made an undisclosed follow-on investment to increase its holding to around 18%.

CFG holds stakes in 13 football clubs over five continents including New York City FC and Melbourne FC. Sheikh Mansour is the chairman of Mubadala, Abu Dhabi’s second largest sovereign wealth fund, whose holdings swelled to $302 billion in assets under management last year.