Man City vs. PSG: How Qatar's European champions view Abu Dhabi's Premier League woes originally appeared on The Sporting News. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
For the past decade and a half, Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain have been grouped together as the great, state-fuelled twin threat to Europe’s soccer elite and its fabled competitive balance.
City’s Abu Dhabi ownership and PSG’s Qatari powerbrokers have changed the trajectory of two previously big but not consistently successful clubs beyond all recognition, following their respective buyouts in 2008 and 2011.
Predominantly under Pep Guardiola — who will return to the Etihad Stadium stands tonight for the first time since stepping down at the end of last season — and with the help of managerial predecessors Roberto Mancini and Manuel Pellegrini, City have won 26 trophies since Mancini ended their 36-year wait for a major honour with the 2011 FA Cup. Eleven of the past 13 Ligue 1 titles have gone to PSG.
Each club threw billions at reaching the top of the European mountain. It happened for City in 2023, their maiden Champions League success completing Guardiola’s crowning achievement of a treble. PSG arrive in Manchester as back-to-back and reigning European champions, having become only the second club after Real Madrid to retain the trophy this century.
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Whether it’s former French president and PSG fan Nicolas Sarkozy or current UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham, who oversaw huge Abu Dhabi real estate investment during his time as Manchester mayor, both clubs' Middle East ownerships have made friends in the most rarefied corridors of power. Those relationships, of course, existed before their big plays in soccer, but this layer of involvement has been a boon.
And yet, heading into a mouthwatering showdown between the best team in Europe and a side who have won eight out of eight in all competitions this season, these are two clubs and two ownership groups hurtling in very different directions. Maybe that was always inevitable. Despite the giddy oil-money shorthand of many in the western media’s sports pages, these Abu Dhabi and Qatar were never really that much alike.
What is the difference between Man City and PSG's owners?
Manchester City’s guilty verdict in their long-running case with the Premier League, an independent commission last month confirming it had found the 10-time English champions guilty of 114 out of 115 charges of breaking competition rules, feels like it has shifted English soccer completely off its axis.
PSG also seemed like potential pariahs once upon a time. UEFA’s Financial Fair Play (FFP) rules came in at the start of the previous decade as a response to the shocking spectacle of proud old clubs living beyond their means, and dicing with liquidation and ruin. The rules have been successful on those terms, but they also had the additional consequence of checking two new cash-rich owners ploughing fortunes in their football clubs.
The most damning of the Football Leaks emails that sparked the City case come from this period. In 2014, both City and PSG entered into settlement agreements with UEFA having exceeded their spending parameters under FFP. The prevailing view was of two peas in a pod; two oil states with bottomless wells of cash who had to be stopped.
Fast forward a decade and PSG president Nasser Al-Khelaifi is the chair of European Football Clubs (EFC) — still more commonly referred to as the European Club Association (ECA) following a recent rebrand. Al-Khelaifi jumped into the vacuum created by the 2021 European Super League crisis, when six Premier League clubs, including City, and 12 across England, Spain and Italy overall, pitched a breakaway competition that swiftly collapsed under the weight of its own absurdity.
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ECA chair and Juventus chief Andrea Agnelli was disgraced as a member of the ‘dirty dozen’, who were expelled from the ECA. PSG and Bayern Munich stood alone among Europe’s most powerful clubs and Al-Khelaifi stepped into the breach. He built bridges and all of the breakaway clubs are back in the organisation under his leadership.
When City chief executive Ferran Soriano awkwardly stonewalled questions about City’s guilty verdict at the EFC Congress in Copenhagen, Al-Khelaifi was there to give the keynote address. His role allows him to sit on the UEFA Executive Committee. As City continue to existentially rage against the machine, PSG are comfortably ensconced among the elite.
"They will see it as vindication of their approach, which has been much more conciliatory and consensual, rather than confrontational and aggressive, like Abu Dhabi at City,” Professor Simon Chadwick, an expert in international sports management and geopolitics, told The Sporting News. "But I think it will also serve to heighten their vigilance around financial fair play rules and so on.
"Al-Khelaifi is sitting on UEFA's executive council; he knows exactly what UEFA is discussing around these matters. At worst, he could sit there and listen. But I think more than that, he can actually begin to influence the kind of decisions around financial play regulations that are being made.”
Chadwick has spent a lot of time in the Middle East and, the diverging paths rolling out ahead of City and PSG in 2026 are in step with the contrasting norms and diplomatic approaches of two very different countries.
"It think it's a really important point, fundamentally,"he said. "It's a bit like comparing Britain and France, or France and Germany. From 3,000 miles away, they may look very similar to each other, but they are actually very different.
"Keep in mind that the United Arab Emirates has actually got really quite an important strategic location, very close to the Strait of Hormuz. So, in terms of global power, the United Arab Emirates is a very different beast to Qatar.
"If you look at Qatar, it's like a thumb. It's a peninsula sticking out of Saudi Arabia. It's really vulnerable. So, in Qatar's case, when you're vulnerable as a country, you know, you can't really throw your weight around. You've got to make friends, whereas in the United Arab Emirates case, you can be much more bullish and assertive because, strategically you're in a much more powerful position".
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If that sounds an awful lot like the manner in which City chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak – also an important and prominent government diplomat for Abu Dhabi – and his colleagues in the Etihad Stadium boardroom have run the Premier League case, that's because it is.
"The position of we've got irrefutable evidence, we're gonna fight our case, etcetera… that is essentially what Abu Dhabi does," Chadwick said. "It is engaged in relationships with other nations. I read a report last year that described the United Arab Emirates as the most toxic and divisive influence in Africa right now. So not Russia, not the United States, not China, but the United Arab Emirates. They are incredibly aggressive, very often draconian in the way that they chase things down. They're absolutely determined not to be dictated to.
"Now, if you set this in a bit of a broader context, globally there is this is this view that the United Arab Emirates is in competition with Saudi Arabia: Who rules the Gulf region? So, Saudi Arabia thinks it rules the Gulf region, but the United Arab Emirates thinks it rules the Gulf region. They're incredibly bullish and assertive.
"Comparing that with Qatar, and I guess the best illustration of Qatari diplomacy is what PSG did when the European Super League emerged. They seek alliances and partnerships rather than confrontation. Lo and behold, Nasser Al-Khelaifi is chair of the ECA. Qatar hedges. In simple terms, it tries to be everybody's friend. That, of course, is very, very different to the United Arab Emirates, which takes the view of, we don't care if we've got enemies, we're going to do what we do."
It means Enzo Maresca's City team and their devil-may-care, inflatable banana-waving fanbase will hurl themselves into the escapism of a football game against the backdrop of a doomsday scenario once again. In the opposite corner are the kings of Europe, more comfortable in those clothes than anyone might have imagined during their days of Messi, Neymar and Mbappe largesse.
Nevertheless, Chadwick cautions that PSG's seemingly unimpeachable place at the top table is not necessarily a permanent one, flagging the owner's brewing conflict with Paris' authorities over plans to renovate their much-loved but careworn Parc des Princes home.
"PSG has threatened over the last two or three years to actually move the club outside Paris boundaries," he explained. "Now, of course, they were to do that, the landscape changes, because it would be very expensive. You're then into needing to balance the books, so you'd need to look towards new sponsorship arrangements. Who would there be? Would they be with Qatari state-linked entities?
"Whilst it appears all plain sailing for Paris Saint-Germain, obviously the diplomatic picture and where Al-Khelaifi sits could change, [as much as] the relationship between Paris Saint-Germain and local government in Paris could also change."
It's always tempting and pleasing to paint broad, bold conclusions over the future of soccer, especially when such powerful entities and Abu Dhabi and Qatar enter the field. Viewing them as an oil-money monolith, as one big supervillain, meant you could tap out on their differences. But as City stare over a precipice, Qatar's moves being contrastingly informed by its ever-present vulnerability looks like PSG's greatest strength.