WHY CITY CAN BE THE BEST IN THE WORLD

IT was perhaps inevitable that His Highness Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan would one day become the owner of a Premier League football club. ‘I have always enjoyed business, I have a love for the game, and I like to compete,’ he says simply. But why City? ‘Investing in a club was an obvious thing to do,’ he adds in a rare interview. ‘The fundamentals of City are unshakeable. They had been tested with the team’s fall to the lower division and were obviously strong. City was everything I was looking for. It was a sleeping giant.’ Over the last decade, Sheikh Mansour and chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak have collaborated closely on the progress. ‘He and I speak about City almost daily,’ says Sheikh Mansour. ‘No. Actually pretty much daily. I think we have the ideal understanding and working rhythm. It allows me to be involved as much or as little as my schedule will allow.’ Although he has only attended one match in person at the Etihad Stadium, Sheikh Mansour finds a way to ensure he watches all City’s fixtures. ‘I love watching the games,’ he says. ‘That’s ultimately what is most important. At the end of the day, I am a fan and live the games in the same way as every other fan. I watch the games wherever I am in the world.’ For Sheikh Mansour, the FA Cup semi-final win over Manchester United on April 16, 2011 was a watershed moment. ‘That was the moment I knew we had arrived at a new level in our climb to where we wanted to be,’ he says. ‘The team was deliberate in its performance that day. I don’t think I ever felt nervous, simply because the team were playing with the right mentality.’ Sheikh Mansour was just as stunned as anybody else when City won their first Premier League title a year later. ‘The QPR game for me was exactly as it was for everyone else,’ he says. ‘I don’t think we will ever see anything like that again. My hope is that we compete for the Premier League every year, so it was a feeling that I knew we had to get used to quickly.’ What’s not yet clear is where the project ends. He is showing no sign of losing interest any time soon. In fact, he makes no attempt to disguise the fact that he fully intends to move the goalposts. ‘The journey for City was always about trying to complete our work in a way that saw us achieve benchmarks that had yet to be set within football,’ he explains. ‘To do that we had to look at everything and make sure that every part of the organisation, and what it did, moved to a new standard for football. ‘We’re not there yet but we have come a long way. And I think people who know me well will tell you that if we ever do look like we are getting there, we will set new standards and targets to aim for.’ Although he might sound hard to please in business, Sheikh Mansour the football fan seems more than satisfied with the football being played by City a decade after he bought the club. ‘Beautiful, intelligent and passionate,’ he says, when asked to describe the way the team played under Pep Guardiola in 2017-18. ‘It’s the kind of evolved game that I had hoped we would one day achieve.’