By Matthew Brooker Sometimes you can be too successful. “You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off,” Michael Caine tells an over-enthusiastic explosives specialist in , a heist movie that ends with a coach loaded with gold bullion hanging over a precipice. The Manchester City sports-diplomacy bus, laden with more than $1 billion of allegedly illicit wealth from Abu Dhabi, is also perched on a cliff edge.

Had the football club not become a serial champion and the dominant force in the English game, its fall from grace wouldn’t have made such an attention-grabbing global controversy. This is the double-edged sword of using such investments to raise and shape the international profile of autocratic states, a practice known pejoratively as “sportswashing.”An independent commission determined this week that the club circumvented Premier League rules to overstate revenues and understate expenses by a combined £949.9 million ($1.26 billion) — a gap that was filled by disguised equity contributions from Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan’s Abu Dhabi United Group. If those findings are confirmed on appeal, the soft-power objectives of the project will be shredded.

To a large extent, the public-relations damage is already done. The alleged conduct described by the panel, which held 42 days of hearings and considered 7,000 pages of witness and expert transcripts, reveals a pattern of deception extending over almost a decade. Even if the club prevails on appeal, this is an impression that will linger in the public mind.

Buying an asset that’s part of a globally recognized brand such as the Premier League brings not only international prominence but a higher level of scrutiny. Here again, Man City’s owners succeeded too well. The world has become more familiar with the methods of an Abu Dhabi-owned club, and the result is not favorable to the emirate.

One standout aspect of the case is how the club and its representatives have gone from welcoming an independent commission that would “impartially” consider its evidence to attacking the legitimacy of the proceedings. Manchester City described the panel’s formal decision as an “opinion,” implied it was subject to “partisan influence” and vowed to be “relentless” in pressing its innocence. The club’s chief executive officer, Ferran Soriano, called the guilty verdicts “a Premier League conspiracy theory.”To appeal is an exercise in the rule of law. Regulators and courts can get things wrong, as City has shown in the past. In 2024, the club successfully challenged the Premier League’s associated-party transaction rules. Fours year earlier, it overturned a two-year ban from European club competitions at the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Switzerland.

But to treat an adverse ruling as inherently illegitimate suggests a different mindset. Abu Dhabi is a hereditary monarchy, where political parties are banned and media are tightly controlled. Accountability tends to be vertical — upward to the rulers, rather than horizontal to independent institutions. Freedom House gives the United Arab Emirates, a federation in which Abu Dhabi is the dominant partner, zero out of four for judicial independence.

“There has been some degree of shock in Abu Dhabi over the ruling,” Christopher Davidson, a Middle East scholar and author of several books on the region, told me. There was an assumption that the case would be allowed to drift away as any UK government would recognize the damage such a ruling could do to economic relations with the UAE, an impression reinforced by theg this year of a trade deal with the Gulf Cooperation Council. This “speaks to a lack of full understanding over the separation of powers in functioning democracies,” Davidson said.

If City’s owners are under the misapprehension that the UK executive can intervene in a judicial proceeding, then one person who isn’t helping disabuse them of that idea is Britain’s new prime minister, Andy Burnham. The former Manchester mayor told the BBC he would be “really concerned” if the owners are forced to sell the club, irritating some of his ruling-party colleagues. The judgment “is serious and there can’t be any suggestion that anyone is above the rules,” a more on-message government spokesperson said.

The City findings are the latest debacle to cast doubt on the effectiveness of sportswashing — or sports-based reputation management, to use a neutral term. Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund sank more than $5 billion into LIV Golf, disrupting the sport but also reviving debate on the kingdom’s human-rights record and the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, before it pulled the plug. Qatar endured similar scrutiny over its criminalization of same-sex relations and treatment of migrant workers before the 2022 World Cup, though the tournament itself was a success.

The Manchester City project is hardly a washout. Its owners have run the club effectively, hiring talented people and achieving unprecedented sporting success — a testament to the emirate’s managerial competence. But if Abu Dhabi really wants to project an image of being modern, progressive and technocratic, it would be better advised to play by the rules.

Unlike in which closes on its cliffhanger, we will get to see a denouement in this case. Until then, Burnham should hold his counsel. No one needs to hang on for the end credits to know that his intervention wasn’t a great idea.

To contact the author of this story: at mbrooker1@bloomberg.net