Mubadala’s Al Mubarak, Fanatics’ Rubin headline Budapest huddle

Khaldoon Al Mubarak, Group CEO of the UAE’s Mubadala sovereign wealth fund and Chairman of Manchester City, joined a dinner with other football executives and investors in Budapest last week to discuss the financial future of the sport.

The gathering was organized by Michael Rubin, founder and CEO of the sports merchandising firm Fanatics, and took place ahead of Saturday’s UEFA Champions League final, which Paris Saint-Germain won, according to a post on Rubin’s Instagram feed.

Among those participating were UEFA President Aleksander Ceferin, Nasser Al-Khelaifi, Chairman of Qatar Sports Investments, which owns PSG; Shahid Khan, owner of Fulham F.C. and the NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars, Alibaba co-founder Joe Tsai who owns the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets, and Robert Kraft, owner of the NFL’s New England Patriots.

The dinner’s guestlist highlighted growing Gulf influence in professional soccer, with Qatar’s ownership of PSG, the UAE’s majority ownership of Manchester City, and the Saudi Public Investment Fund’s majority stake in Newcastle.

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.