Man City and their owners can land blow on Saudi Arabia at Club World Cup
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Pep Guardiola and his Manchester City squad departed for Jeddah just hours after they dropped another two points in a faltering Premier League season that has been interrupted by the small matter of a run at being world champions for the first time in the club’s history.
On Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea coast the club that has flown Abu Dhabi’s flag in Britain for 15 years will compete for the one major trophy missing from the Guardiola era. If English football has always considered the Club World Cup – or Intercontinental Cup as it was known in a previous guise – as something of an after-thought, then it is anything but that in the Gulf this week.
The Saudi ruling class, led by the Crown Prince Mohammed Bin-Salman, have put sport at the centre of their global campaign to change perceptions of this oil-rich, secretive, authoritarian state. In Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, that process began in part with the 2008 acquisition of City. The City Football Group that was born out of it is now a network of 12 clubs around the world.
Guardiola’s City are bruised by a run of just seven points from their last six league games, and the shadow of the Premier League’s 115 charges hangs heavy, but the next few days are not about the politics of domestic or even European football. Rather it is about their part in the struggles between the super-wealthy absolute monarchies that run the fossil fuel billions of the Gulf. Struggles for power, wealth and influence in diplomacy, business, football and, even occasionally, war.
The royal courts of Abu Dhabi and Riyadh are currently at odds over their position in Middle East politics. They have backed different rebel factions in the war currently being fought between two competing powers just over the Red Sea in Sudan, in east Africa. Both countries are trying to diversify their oil-based economies in ways that are commercially sound and reputationally beneficial.
Among them is football. The UAE vice-president Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed, owns City – European champions and perhaps soon to be world champions. City are Abu Dhabi’s flagship sporting project and Mansour has also backed the Barclay family’s £1 billion bid to regain control of the Telegraph. Saudi has its Saudi Pro League, buttressed by more than £1 billion investment, and Newcastle United, owned by the Public Investment Fund.
Should City make it past the Asian champions Urawa Red Diamonds on Tuesday, and then play the final on Friday, they will leave Jeddah just as a new show rolls into Saudi. On Saturday night, Antony Joshua tops a boxing card in Riyadh that includes his opponent, the Swede Otto Wallin, and also Deontay Wilder. The Soundstorm music festival was staged in Riyadh this week, featuring, among others, Calvin Harris, Metallica, 50 Cent and Will Smith. LIV Golf was in Jeddah in October.
Boxing and golf have also played a key role in Saudi seeking to project a modern face to the world, while trying to appease the conservative elements that form a significant part of the powerbase. At the same time both Saudi and UAE face difficult questions on human rights records and seek to maintain a tight domestic grip on power while altering the global profile. This week there is a rare chance meeting of the two, although not quite as Saudi might have hoped for at the start of the Club World Cup.
Saudi champions Al-Ittihad, featuring Karim Benzema, N’Golo Kanté and Fabinho, lost a play-off to Al Ahly of Egypt at the King Abdullah stadium on Friday night. It means Al Ahly, African champions, will play Brazil’s Fluminense, Copa Libertadores winners, in the first semi-final on Tuesday night.
This is Saudi’s first Fifa Club World Cup. Abu Dhabi has hosted three of the previous six. Gianni Infantino, the Fifa president, is now a firm Saudi ally and has backed the kingdom hosting the 2034 World Cup finals. Fifa’s sleight of hand in the award of the 2030 tournament means Saudi will bid for 2034 unopposed next year. Infantino held a Fifa Council meeting at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Jeddah on Sunday to, among other things, finalise qualifying for Fifa’s expanded 2025 Club World Cup.
Professor Simon Chadwick of the Skema Business School in Paris, and an expert on the region and its sporting ambitions says that the prospect of Abu Dhabi’s flagship club becoming world champions in Saudi is significant. “Saudi had lost its way in the last 20 years and been wasteful with its wealth,” he says. “The government interfered too much and it has been overtaken by local rivals. Abu Dhabi is significant because a lot of senior figures there think Abu Dhabi is the leader in the region.”
Chadwick points out that the jostling for global credibility dominates Gulf politics. City’s headline sponsor, Etihad Airways, is the only Gulf airline currently still flying to Israel. In light of the war in Gaza that followed the October 7 terrorist attacks, Saudi stepped back from normalising ties with Israel. Abu Dhabi had already done so. Saudi has cut funding for its proxy war in Yemen, Chadwick says, in order to spend money on projects that change international perception, including sport, and football in particular.
“Saudi is trying to fight back and define a new place for itself in the world,” he says. “In reality it is still trying to work things out. Abu Dhabi gets a little bit of international backlash when it comes to sportswashing. Saudi gets a much bigger backlash for sportswashing.” Chadwick says that while Saudi and Abu Dhabi were aligned in the blockade of Qatar between 2017 and 2021, and the diplomatic crisis that grew out of that, the situation has changed again.
“Saudi is on a charm offensive,” he says, “and the two countries are pitted against each other. There is a view among some that the most disruptive influence in Africa currently is Abu Dhabi. There are fundamental differences between Saudi and Abu Dhabi.”
At the Qatar World Cup finals this time last year, Bin-Salman was a notable presence in the VIP areas of stadiums, and often alongside Infantino. Nevertheless, it was the Qataris’ show and they earned the diplomatic benefit that came with the global scrutiny. A hand the nation has played in mediating between Israel and Hamas in recent months.
This week it will be Saudi’s show, albeit on a much smaller scale. Nevertheless, it comes with the assurance that under Infantino’s Fifa, they will get the big one – the Fifa World Cup finals – in 2034. On Friday night in Jeddah, the team Fifa and their Saudi hosts are most likely to hand the trophy to will be Guardiola’s City, whose own Gulf owners also have their reputations to burnish.
