Manchester City stars are being used to sell a £3 billion luxury housing development in Abu Dhabi despite the furore over the club's guilty verdict for financial cheating, in a move critics have called brazen.
Star striker Erling Haaland, Rayan Cherki and Phil Foden appear in marketing material for the Manchester City Yas residence, a waterfront development by Ohana Development. Haaland has bought a five-bedroom villa on the complex worth at least £1.9 million, and the players featured in a video shown to more than 4,000 VIPs, brokers and government officials at a glittering launch event held last week. City executives also feature in the promotional material, and both Haaland and former manager Pep Guardiola were present at the launch bash.
The campaign landed days after an independent Premier League commission found the club guilty of sham football deals and financial rule breaches over nine seasons, with the panel concluding that around £830 million of owner funding had been disguised through inflated sponsorship arrangements. City have appealed the verdict and deny wrongdoing.
Football author John-Paul O'Neill told The Sun the timing showed contempt for the investigation, saying the club was effectively sticking two fingers up and carrying on as normal. Former player and football campaigner Mickey Ambrose added that it was rich for City to be selling luxury houses in Abu Dhabi in the wake of the guilty verdicts, remarking that supporters must be disappointed by the episode.
The development is the latest example of the close commercial ties between the club and its Abu Dhabi ownership. The entire City Football Group project has long been seen as a vehicle for promoting the United Arab Emirates, and the Yas residence marketing explicitly trades on the club's brand and its star players.
The episode has intensified the backlash facing the club since the verdict. Rival supporters have greeted City players with hostility, including a banner at Anfield reading Gerrard Premier League Winner 2014, while pundits continue to debate whether the club's titles from the offending period should be retrospectively stripped. City, meanwhile, have shown no sign of stepping back from the commercial activity, and the club's lawyers continue to prepare the appeal that will determine whether the most serious penalties in English football history are imposed. The launch event itself, held at the Etihad with Haaland and Guardiola in attendance, was shown to thousands of VIPs, brokers and government officials, underscoring how deeply the Abu Dhabi development is intertwined with the club's brand. For critics, the spectacle of players marketing Gulf luxury property days after a cheating verdict sums up everything they believe is wrong with the modern game.