A look back at how the 2008 Abu Dhabi takeover altered English football and closed the door on rising contenders like Aston Villa and Everton who were poised to challenge Premier League elite


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If there were any doubt beforehand, events of the past week have made clear that the great pivot point of English football history in the 21st century is and perhaps always will be the takeover of Manchester City by Abu Dhabi United Group. With the wealth of a nation state at their back, a club that had not won a major honor since the 1970s won eight Premier League titles in 12 years in addition to a Champions League and a host of domestic cups.

The fury of so many clubs in the Premier League and beyond after news of their financial malfeasance first broke comes from none of them having the answer to the question they are all asking themselves. How different might the last 18 years have been if all of our number had been playing by the rules? For some clubs, the likes of Stoke City and Watford, there are those cup finals that feel like once-in-a-generation moments. For others, there are questions over the lost revenue of Champions League qualification or the commercial deals that may have added tens of millions more to the coffers.

How different might the future have been for some teams if the City takeover had never happened?

The clubs who missed the 'Big Six'
To understand that question, we need to survey the landscape at the end of the 2007-08 season. You would do well to notice Manchester City on the table, ninth on 55 points, the big spending under a controversial new owner, deposed Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, having really only delivered an upper midtable finish off the back of £30 million of spending designed to drag them out of the lower midtable. City were where they had been since their promotion in 2002, safe but unremarkably so.

An inner circle had been established in the Premier League, it was just quite a bit tighter than it is now. The Big Six that might be ended when Manchester City face their sanctions was a quartet, Roman Abramovich's Chelsea and the three most successful clubs in English league history: Liverpool, Manchester United and Arsenal. Since the Russian takeover at Stamford Bridge five years earlier, these teams had claimed positions first to fourth on all but one occasion. They had a financial muscle that few others in the league could match. There were those who were trying, however.

Everton had been the one side to break the Big Four stranglehold on the Champions League places, albeit in the year that Liverpool got entry anyway as defending champions. There are similarities between the Toffees and City, both clubs with sizeable fanbases and rich history who could never quite avoid being compared to their more illustrious neighbors, in this case Liverpool. The consistency with which David Moyes delivered fifth or sixth without anything like the riches of those above him. In the summer that ended with City splurging on Robinho, Everton's biggest signing was Belgian midfielder Marouane Fellaini, whose £15 million fee was largely subsidised by the sale of Andrew Johnson to Fulham.

No wonder when Moyes took on the full might of City three years later he would describe the experience as "like going into a gunfight, and I have got a knife."

Even before the emergence of City, however, Everton were strained on the cash front. If there seemed to be a coming force outside the top four, it might well have been Aston Villa. Though Martin O'Neill's side had finished 16 points off fourth place the previous season, it was a young squad when homegrown England internationals like Gabriel Agbonlahor and Gareth Barry were being supplemented by top domestic talent like James Milner, Ashley Young and Nigel Reo Coker.

Owner Randy Lerner had arrived in 2006 ready to put his own money behind his belief "that Aston Villa can compete at the highest level within the Premiership and in Europe." When he left in ignominy a decade later, Villa bound for the Championship, he had spent over £300 million. Pre-2008, that money might have been enough to buy contention. It is barely half of the money Abu Dhabi United Group were found to have spent topping up their declared income from sponsors.

"It felt like Champions League was on the horizon for us," says Reo-Coker of the vibe in the dressing room at the start of the 2008-09 season, one that would begin with a convincing win for Villa over City. "We felt like the outsiders ready to break in."

And of course it did not require much to break the way of Everton, Villa or Tottenham, who had fallen back somewhat after consecutive fifth places in 2006 and 2007 but were blessed with an extremely talented frontline. A Big Four and four qualification spots for the Champions League: one wobble from an incumbent and these clubs had access to the riches of Europe's premier club competition. Those would have been all the more valuable at a time when the Premier League was only just becoming the broadcast leviathan it now is.

"We would definitely have been that club," says Reo-Coker. "If you look at the players that were still at the club, how we were growing as a team, we would have just needed one push. We had momentum. We could have become a top six club. A lot of the players at that time were happy at Villa.

"We were starting to make progress. We were in Europe, though we didn't care as much as we should have. We wanted to crack that top four."

Then came the City takeover. Players who had seen the sudden emergence of a title winner at Stamford Bridge five years earlier knew what to expect as offers started dropping for Robinho and Dimitar Berbatov. "We got the feeling something was about to change on that day," Reo-Coker reflects. "A smart football player would have just said, all right, this is another Chelsea. We already knew.

"Money changes the game. Players start thinking about money. When you know a club like Manchester City have emerged and you know they're going to start spending money, a top-level player is going to start thinking differently."

City's first full summer under Abu Dhabi ownership would begin with Villa's determination to retain club captain Barry finally breaking. Milner would follow in 2010, Fabian Delph five years later as the club began to circle the drain to the Championship. For Everton too it was Joleon Lescott early on, Jack Rodwell and John Stones in subsequent years.

Owners simply could not keep up at the price point that City introduced to the game. That did not stop them trying, and the frustration among Everton and Villa fans will be all the more palpable now given that these clubs are among those to have most chafed against the Premier League's financial settlement. Under Nassef Sawiris' ownership, Villa have consistently brushed against spending limits that their owner wants to stretch beyond. Instead they are locked in a never-ending rebuild, their best and brightest shifted out to English clubs with deeper pockets.

Meanwhile, Everton were not only docked six points for PSR breaches during the period when Farhad Moshiri tried to spend his way into the elite, but the £35 million in damages and interest awarded to Burnley, relegated as the Toffees spent big, might have set the template for a rush of lawsuits in City's direction.

The upper echelons
If there was another club that came to know what it was like to be picked over by City it was Arsenal. Emmanuel Adebayor and Kolo Toure both arrived at the Etihad in the summer of 2009, two years later Samir Nasri and Gael Clichy joined them. And yet this does not feel like quite the same talent drain.

After all, the north London side were in a position where they needed to sell players to fund their move to the Emirates Stadium, one which they were on an inevitable path towards when first Chelsea and then City changed the terms of engagement financially. Arsenal had expected matchday revenue to be the key growth market of the decades ahead, but instead found what David Dein termed tanks "in our front garden... firing £50 notes at us".

And yet, with a stadium to fund, was it the worst thing to have a new buyer emerge on the market? In a short space of time, Arsenal got £72 million back in the days when that was more than the starting price for any Premier League midfielder. For their money, City got an indelible celebration from Adebayor, the ever-decreasing circles of Toure's quality, solid left back play from Clichy and one shining year out of five from Nasri. It is hard to make the case that any were as good in sky blue as they had been in red. Though their departure undoubtedly contributed to the status anxiety in north London, with 15 years of distance it becomes apparent that this is the sort of shrewd selling that gets a much more favorable write-up now than it did then.

Certainly there might have been a few more trophies in Arsene Wenger's final years had it not been for what he termed the "financial doping" at City. The 3-0 loss to Pep Guardiola's side in the 2018 EFL Cup Final was a humiliating sign of how far Arsenal had fallen; their decline only accelerated the previous year when City had been one of the teams to emerge successfully from the 75-point-plus shootout and the Gunners had not. Really though, could anyone in North London convincingly argue that a Premier League title or two were snared from Wenger by the emergence of City? He and his team were already in their post-prime years, primed to benefit from all the economic advantages of their status in a burgeoning Premier League.

After all, none of the Big Four had their status stolen by City's emergence. They just had to accept two interlopers into their club, Tottenham's ability to at least get to the cusp of major honors a quite compelling riposte to the idea that the so-called red cartel will now be entrenched at the top of the game.

Where Arsenal do have a case to grumble is over their experience in the last four seasons. In each of those and several before, Mikel Arteta's side nailed every major recruitment decision, established an effective play style and swept a bereft fanbase along for a thrilling ride. Their reward for getting everything right was to be battered and bruised when they finally found a way past a City side who, in recruitment terms, had lost their eye for talent, particularly in midfield, but who had built up quite the head start in the years up to 2018.

No one felt the difficulty of going up against City more profoundly than Liverpool, denied their first title in 25 years in 2014 and then able to parlay one Premier League crown out of three seasons where Jurgen Klopp led them beyond the 90-point mark. Theirs was the exemplary rebuild and it seems all the crueller now that when they finally ended their long wait for a league title it came in the empty stadia of COVID-19 football. There may well be retribution in the months to follow -- Liverpool were one of those clubs who served notice on City in 2024, reserving the right to seek compensation after a guilty verdict -- but no asterisk, no stripping of titles can give this club the moments it might have had.

When the possibility of the Premier League stripping titles was first put to Klopp he was joking about parties in Mallorca. Now that such sanctions are on the table, his enthusiasm has understandably waned. "I'm a long way from preparing myself for it in any way, and I don't have any feelings about it," the now Germany manager said this week.

"It's not as if I need that right now, just so I can say 'I've been English champion more times.' I'm completely fine with what's happened and what we've achieved." He may not have any complaints he is minded to air in public, but it is impossible to shake the sense that he deserves more.

Of course the sliding doors moment of the City takeover does prompt some intriguing what if questions. Are Liverpool quite as appealing a prospect to Klopp, three months on from his Borussia Dortmund exit, if Brendan Rodgers has already delivered that long-awaited league title the year before? Where might Guardiola have landed? Sir Alex Ferguson had viewed him as his first choice to succeed him at Old Trafford. Guardiola had wanted to spend the twilight years of his playing career at Arsenal, might he have gone there after Bayern?

That speaks to how different the experience of the English elite was to the likes of Villa and Everton. With the "sham contracts" funding their revolution, City raised the on-field standards in the Premier League such that consistent excellence was the bare minimum to compete for titles. How different would that have been without City? Arsenal, Manchester United and Liverpool lost out in terms of volume of trophies but their status was largely unchanged over what might be looked at as a two-decade blip. Whatever the financial settlement, however the next iteration of PSR and SCR is framed, these clubs will always have the innate advantages of geography, history and scale. Whether through legitimate means or otherwise, future Manchester Citys may emerge, but it might take a revolution even more profound and long-lasting than Abu Dhabi's to depose the Premier League aristocracy.

What of City?
And then there is City. It goes without saying that the tainted triumphs of the last 18 years would have been unimaginable without Abu Dhabi's backing. What might have been. Oasis' principal songwriter and Manchester City's highest-profile fan Noel Gallagher put it best in a 2024 interview with The Athletic.

"When I explain it to Sonny, my youngest lad, I think the perfect analogy is: 'If you want to know what it used to be like, look at Everton'," Gallagher said. "If City hadn't been bought by Sheikh Mansour, it would have been takeover after takeover, all sorts of f---wits coming in, failure and broken promises."

Or in less robust terms, City's lived experience of the last two decades would have been much the same as most every other Premier League side. And, subject to finding the right buyer after Shinawatra's assets were sold, City probably would have been solidly in the top flight.

In the final iteration of the Deloitte Football Money League before the Abu Dhabi takeover, City ranked as the 21st-richest club in Europe by revenue, trailing only Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal, Liverpool, Tottenham and Newcastle United among Premier League clubs. The 2002 Commonwealth Games had afforded them a 48,000-capacity stadium for which they pay an annual lease of between £3 million and £4 million a year.

In the years before the takeover City had hit a rich seam of talent in their academy with the likes of Micah Richards, Daniel Sturridge and Stephen Ireland all going on to establish themselves at the club. The first team was stocked full of the sort of players the streets will never forget: Geovanni, Elano, Vedran Corluka, Benjani. Dudes can literally just sit around and name pre-takeover Manchester City players and just have the best time.

From that starting point, could a well-run club have built the sort of solid contender for the European places that would on various occasions be West Ham, Leicester, Aston Villa or Newcastle? Unquestionably. With a few breaks in the right direction, City might have got out in front of Villa and Everton by fair means instead.

Would that have been a preferable generation to that which the Etihad Stadium has lived through? Many City supporters, Gallagher among them, will tell you today that they would not take the alternative path. One wonders if they might still feel the same if the disciplinary process leads to the devastating punishments that have been mooted.

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Posted by Temmy
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