Gulf backing taking football into a sphere where Liverpool will wonder if they’ll ever be champions again

It sounded so outlandish that even the Mercury didn’t go mad on the story - they politely reported the Leicester owner’s aims while avoiding hyping things up for the fans. After all, the money Vichai promised to invest was no more than £60 million a season. Two years later, Leicester were Premier League champions and Vichai had delivered, in fact spending only £25 million a season, 12 months ahead of schedule.

In those days it was still possible to believe in miracles and, indeed, watch them unfold on a Premier League field, but less than seven years on, football is in a different sphere, one where Cristiano Ronaldo earns £514,000 a day in Saudi Arabia and £100 million transfers are becoming common.

It’s through this lens that the potential £5 billion sale of Manchester United to a sheikh with access to Qatar’s boundlessly cascading wealth may be seen. Soon the question may be less whether a Leicester could ever be English champions again, and more whether it could ever be a Liverpool.

The announcement that Skeikh Jassim bin Hamad Al Thani is bidding for United came just after 8.30pm on Friday. It was followed by news that the Mancunian billionaire Sir Jim Ratcliffe, who owns the chemical giant Ineos, has also submitted an offer. Raine Group, the New York bankers selling the club for the Glazer family, had set a soft deadline of 10pm on Friday and are yet to reveal if there are any other bidders, with interest from US private equity firms expected and the Qatari camp braced for competition from Saudi Arabia.

The Glazers want at least £5 billion, and Raine Group, who successfully sold Chelsea, hope to secure between £6 billion and £8 billion. Sheikh Jassim is offering to make United debt free and wants to rebuild Old Trafford, adding about £1 billion to the purchase cost - then invest significantly in players for both men’s and women’s teams.

The Sandhurst-educated, 41-year-old son of Qatar’s former prime minister, who chairs the leading Qatari bank, QIB, Sheikh Jassim is bidding as an individual and his personal wealth is unknown, but the template appears to be the 2008 purchase of Manchester City by Sheikh Mansour - an Abu Dhabi prince, with access to his country’s vast petro-fortune.

Another template may be the maturing of the Qatari project at Paris Saint-Germain. After several years of bling signings such as £200 million Neymar, the strategy has morphed into something more canny and locally focused. With the last batch of galactico recruits (who included Lionel Messi and Sergio Ramos) arriving on free transfers, last summer’s recruitment focused on signings who were young and/or French and the appointment - instead of glitzy Zinedine Zidane - of Christophe Galtier as manager. On Tuesday a 16-year-old Parisian, Warren Zaire-Emery, started for PSG against Bayern Munich in the Champions League and £400 million is being spent on a new training ground.

While Ratcliffe would also put Manchester and United traditions at the centre of his ownership, Sheikh Jassim is regarded as favourite because of the resources behind him. As a source put it: “He’s not come in to play, he’s come in to win,” and from World Cup hosting (which cost about €200 billion) to turning PSG from a club bought for $70 million (in 2011) to one about to announce minority US investment that will value it at $4.2 billion, Qatar has demonstrated ability to make its money count.

The Premier League is unlikely to raise any “state ownership” objections, given that it was willing to accept Newcastle United are not controlled by Saudi Arabia despite 80 per cent of the club being bought by that country’s sovereign wealth fund (PIF) in 2021. Uefa rules supposedly restrict multi-club ownership but sources close to the Qataris are adamant there is a clear division between Sheikh Jassim, the Qatar Investment Authority sovereign wealth fund and QSI (Qatar Sports Investments) which owns PSG. They are perplexed multi-ownership concerns focus on Qatar and not Ineos - which also owns Nice.

There’s also the question of how serious the regulations are, given Uefa allows RB Leipzig and Red Bull Salzburg (both owned by the same energy drinks company) to go head-to-head in the Champions League and that 250 clubs in Europe already have ownerships with interests in more than one club, including nine (Manchester City, Arsenal, Brighton & Hove Albion, Brentford, Leicester City, West Ham United, Southampton, Nottingham Forest, Crystal Palace) in the Premier League.

The Premier League introduced “fair market value” regulations, after the Saudi purchase of Newcastle, to curb state wealth’s scope to inject money into teams via sponsorships by associated companies and it has charged Manchester City with breaching its financial rules 115 times while Sheikh Mansour was growing the club. However, United already draw enough revenue for the Glazers to have spent more than £1 billion, net, on transfers since taking over in 2005 - this while draining £1.6 billion from the club via dividends, fees, interest repayments and a share sale. Even by just stopping the outflow of cash, and without the new investment he plans to put in, Sheikh Jassim could pump United’s transfer muscle like Popeye downing his spinach.

Other clubs’ concerns centre on this. They view the market as already inflated, in a season Chelsea have spent £600 million under the new ownership of American Todd Boehly and City signed Erling Haaland on a contract that, with bonuses, is reportedly worth £865,000 a week.

An increase in United’s outlay (already near the top of Premier League clubs over the past decade) would alter it further. Certain members of Europe’s traditional elite view themselves on one side and clubs with new money from Gulf states on the other - articulated by the former Barcelona president, Josep Maria Bartomeu, who railed in 2017, after PSG signed Neymar: “Something must be done. It can’t be the case that there’s money that comes from outside of football and is pumped into the industry.”

Given Barcelona are trying to recover from near financial ruin (much of it incurred on Bartomeu’s watch) and that Juventus are threatened by a scandal that involves the alleged secret payment of players - and that these clubs, plus Real Madrid are still trying to flog the dead horse of Super League - the idea that the old elite are guardians of the game raises eyebrows in “new money” quarters. Nonetheless, a Qatar buyout of United would be hugely symbolic - the first iconic, traditional-aristocracy club to go into Gulf state hands.

Newcastle are already in a cup final and challenging for Champions League football while City have dominated in an unprecedented way, challenging for a fifth Premier League title in six seasons. In Pep Guardiola’s 388 matches in charge, City have had one 9-0, one 8-0, three 7-0 and five 6-0 wins and scored four goals or more in a match 97 times. Arsenal regained initiative in the title race yesterday (Saturday) and, if they hold City off, it would strike a blow for clubs following the “self-sustaining” model. Liverpool (2019-20) are the only club of that ilk to be champions since Leicester, despite the heights reached under Jurgen Klopp. But, in the changing game, how often can that model win titles again?

Steve Gans, a sports lawyer and partner at the Boston firm Prince Lobel, who has advised American investors in Premier League football, believes Qatar buying United would “make many potential [US] owners take a deep breath”. A number would still press ahead with investments in English clubs but others would be “chilled” by the prospect of another nation state pumping resources into a Premier League team. “At a certain point, there is a question about whether one can keep up with a growing critical mass of sovereign wealth funds’ unlimited funds,” he said. “You might not want to take over an iconic club whose stature is put in jeopardy, under your watch, for reasons beyond your control, and reasons you simply cannot effectively address.”

Meanwhile, other Premier League owners are watching closely the league’s attempt to prosecute City. The source (as long as it is legal) and level of counterparts’ riches is less a concern than whether ownerships adhere to the competition’s rules, including those around Financial Fair Play, one suggested. If mega-wealthy clubs act outside of regulation, the rest may as well pack it in, was his view.

Kieran Maguire, the football finance expert, describes “a constant ratcheting up. The millionaires have been replaced by the multimillionaires, who have been replaced by the billionaires - but the billionaires are now being replaced by the multibillionaires”. When Saudi Arabia bought Newcastle, says Maguire, “the question I was asked most often [by fans] was, ‘How much can we spend?’ Using the word ‘we’.”

It overrode any moral or ethical concerns among fans, though Fair Square, the human rights advocacy, has written to Uefa warning “state ownership of European football clubs jeopardises the integrity of the game”, criticising Qatar and describing the countries involved in buying teams as “autocratic states characterised by repression and the absence of the rule of law”. United’s official LGBTQ+ supporters’ club also has “deep concerns” about some of the parties bidding for their team.

However, the Sheikh Jassim bid is promising to put fan engagement at the heart of how it would run United and said those from all communities would be welcomed at Old Trafford. There’s a feeling that what happens on the pitch speaks the loudest. During the World Cup, the head of the Asian confederation, Sheikh Salman Al-Khalifa, a member of Bahrain’s ruling family, rebuked those criticising Qatar’s hosting of the event with an Arab proverb: “The dogs bark but the caravan moves on.”

On Tuesday, the caravan was at Parc des Princes, where Qatar-owned PSG played Qatar-sponsored Bayern Munich. On Wednesday it was at Arsenal’s stadium, named after a Dubai airline, for the visit of Abu Dhabi-backed Manchester City. Next week it rolls to Wembley, where Saudi Newcastle face a United who may be about to become the latest Gulf-backed football power, and hasten the changing climate of the sport.

- The Times

Originally published as Gulf backing taking football into a sphere where Liverpool will wonder if they’ll ever be champions again