Weeks before Sudan flamed into a calamitous civil war, one of the richest men in the Middle East, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, welcomed an architect of the chaos to his sumptuous Persian Gulf palace.
The sheikh, a younger brother to the powerful ruler of the United Arab Emirates, is recognized in the West as a collector of superyachts and racehorses, and is perhaps best known as the owner of Manchester City, the hugely successful English soccer team. Last year, his team in New York won approval to build a $780 million soccer stadium in Queens, the first in the city.
Yet there he was, in February 2023, openly entertaining a notorious commander from the deserts of western Sudan — someone who had seized power in a coup, built a fortune on illicit gold and was accused of widespread atrocities.
The two men knew each other well. Sheikh Mansour had hosted the Sudanese commander, Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, two years earlier at an arms fair in the Emirates, where they toured exhibits of rockets and drones.
And when Sudan’s conflict exploded, in April 2023, Sheikh Mansour helped the general wage war.
Charities controlled by Sheikh Mansour set up a hospital, saying they were treating civilians. But that humanitarian effort was also a cover for the secret Emirati effort to smuggle drones and other powerful weapons to General Hamdan’s group, the Rapid Support Forces, or R.S.F., according to American and U.N. officials.
A flood of evidence has emerged of massacres, mass rape and genocide by General Hamdan’s forces. Sudan’s military has also been accused of war crimes.
The Emiratis deny arming any side in the war, but the United States has intercepted regular phone calls between General Hamdan and the leaders of the Emirates, including Sheikh Mansour.
The intelligence helped American officials conclude that the unassuming Emirati royal has played a central role in the effort to arm General Hamdan’s forces, inflaming a devastating conflict that has led to famine and the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis.
Sheikh Mansour, General Hamdan and the Emirati Foreign Ministry did not respond to detailed questions for this article.
Despite owning one of the world’s most famous soccer teams, Sheikh Mansour, 54, has remained an enigma, often showing a chameleon-like ability to disappear into the background, overshadowed by his more prominent or powerful siblings.
Yet in interviews with more than a dozen American, African and Arab officials, he is described as being at the sharp end of his country’s aggressive push to expand its influence across Africa and the Middle East.
In places like Libya and Sudan, they say, Sheikh Mansour has coddled warlords and autocrats as part of a sweeping Emirati drive to acquire ports and strategic minerals, counter Islamist movements and establish the Gulf nation as a heavyweight regional power.
While his brother, the hawkish ruler of the Emirates, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, undoubtedly steers that policy, Sheikh Mansour has quietly carved out a powerful backing role — bolstering the nation’s soft power through soccer while also fostering ties with armed leaders in some of the world’s most fragile countries, the officials say.
“He’s the fixer, the handler, the one sent to places without much glamour or publicity, but which are important to the Emiratis,” said Andrew P. Miller, a former senior U.S. diplomat. “That seems to be his niche.”
At least a half-dozen other officials described Sheikh Mansour the same way.
In the West, Sheikh Mansour has largely remained under the radar. He rarely meets Western diplomats, does not speak to reporters and has hardly ever attended games of Manchester City, the celebrated team he owns. When his ventures have become embroiled in international charges of corruption or breaching international arms embargoes, he has avoided censure.
Now, though, that sense of gilded immunity is starting to crack.
Last year, the British government passed a law that, in effect, prevented Sheikh Mansour from acquiring a venerable newspaper, fearing it could affect press freedom. Trials in the United States and Malaysia have uncovered accusations that Sheikh Mansour profited from the 1MDB scandal, one of the world’s biggest financial frauds.
The worsening war in Sudan, a sprawling conflict that has caused over 150,000 deaths and displaced over 12 million people, has led to accusations that the Emirates is bankrolling a genocide. Democratic lawmakers have called for a block on U.S. weapons sales to the Emirates.
And now, Sheikh Mansour’s sporting jewel is under siege.
A British panel is considering sweeping accusations that Manchester City has cheated on a grand scale. His team has been accused by its own league of manipulating its finances to fund the purchase of star players who assured the club’s stunning run of victories, transforming it from a group of stumbling has-beens into an international sporting phenomenon.
Manchester City denies the accusations, but if found guilty, the team could be fined, relegated or stripped of its many titles. It is also a moment of reckoning for Sheikh Mansour, whose dealings are now under the kind of spotlight he has long sought to avoid.
Manchester City did not respond to a request for comment.
Whatever the ruling, the case raises the prospect that the extraordinary secrecy he has enjoyed, fueled by a seemingly inexhaustible spigot of money, may be coming to an end.
This is the story of the sheikh who preferred to stay hidden.
The Sheikh of Soccer
In his grandparents’ generation, most inhabitants of what is now the Emirates were date farmers, camel herders and pearl fishermen. The discovery of oil in the 1960s set off a breathtaking transformation that first focused on the city state of Dubai.
Mirrored buildings sprung from the desert, and ski runs now twist through shopping malls, turning the city into an archetype of petrostate bling.
The more conservative capital, Abu Dhabi, has turned into a finance hot spot and aspiring artificial intelligence superpower. The city has become such a global investment hub that it bills itself as the “capital of capital.”
One family sits at the top.
The al-Nahyans of Abu Dhabi are the world’s second-richest family, after the Waltons of the United States, by some estimates. They have ruled the Emirates since independence in 1971, and their power is concentrated in a group known as the “Bani Fatima” — six sons of the favored wife of the country’s founding father, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan. Three of the sons dominate.
The eldest brother, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, 64, known as M.B.Z., has been the de facto ruler for more than two decades.
Under him is Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, 56, often referred to as the “spy sheikh” — a sunglasses-wearing national security adviser and fitness enthusiast who likes to play chess on his superyacht and has bonded with Mark Zuckerberg, the Meta founder, over jujitsu.
The third-most powerful brother, Sheikh Mansour, keeps a much lower profile.
As deputy prime minister and vice president, he controls key institutions, including the Emirati central bank, the national oil company and the Abu Dhabi criminal authority. He chairs Mubadala, a fast-growing $330 billion sovereign wealth fund with investments in artificial intelligence, semiconductors and space tourism.
He is a key figure in his country’s efforts to acquire global sway through soft power, including trying to build a media empire. He has partnered with British Sky Broadcasting and CNN for television stations and websites in Arabic, and handed a $1 billion war chest to Jeff Zucker, a former president of CNN, to acquire media outlets around the world.
In public, Sheikh Mansour tends to linger on the sidelines. He is often seen sponsoring traditional Emirati activities like camel races and date festivals. His statements are mostly notable for how bland they are.
But in the world of soccer, he has become a veritable giant, helping the royals rebrand themselves after a devastating setback. In 2006, two years before Sheikh Mansour bought Manchester City, the Emirates suffered a very public rejection. Its attempt to buy six seaports in the United States was blocked amid a fierce political backlash, even though the Emirates had allied closely with Washington after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
It was a seminal moment, causing Emirati leaders to set about reshaping their international image, by investing in culture, academia and sport. Sheikh Mansour led the charge on soccer.
Only hours after buying Manchester City for $330 million, he forked out a record sum for a new player — the first in a string of expensive acquisitions, costing at least $3.5 billion, that transformed the team into a soccer behemoth.
Manchester City soon picked up its first championship in decades. Since then, it has won the Premier League another seven times, as well as the biggest prize in club soccer, the Champions League. In 2023, it raked in $100 million in profits from almost $1 billion in revenues, ranking it among the most lucrative sports teams in the world.
“Sheikh Mansour, Manchester Thanks You,” reads a banner that hangs permanently at its home stadium, which is named after Etihad Airways, a national carrier of the Emirates.
As the trophies piled up, Sheikh Mansour bought a dozen other teams, including in Melbourne, Mumbai and Yokohama. The new stadium for his soccer team in New York — New York City F.C. — will have a name similar to the one in Manchester: Etihad Park.
Rival Gulf nations have followed suit, snapping up their own British or European teams.
Manchester City has also served political purposes. Team officials invited journalists to briefings in 2014 by consultants working for the Emirates. Rather than discussing soccer, the briefings sought to link Qatar, a rival of the Emirates, to international terrorism, according to a journalist present and a briefing dossier seen by The New York Times.
Sheikh Mansour’s personal passion for soccer, however, is unclear. Since buying Manchester City 17 years ago, he has seen the team play just twice in competition, and only once at the Etihad Stadium.
But in that period, Emirati priorities have shifted to hard power as well — and so have Sheikh Mansour’s.
The Handler
The Arab Spring in 2011 was a turning point for the al-Nahyans.
As autocrats toppled across the Middle East, the family worried that it might be next. The Emirati ruler, Sheikh Mohammed, told Western officials that he feared the surging strength of Islamist political groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and vowed to stop them in their tracks.
The Emirates intervened forcefully in countries like Egypt, Libya and Yemen. But that often involved backing military takeovers, arming rebels or forging alliances with unreformed warlords. To manage some of those relationships, a delicate hand was needed.
Enter Sheikh Mansour.
On orders from his brother, the Emirati ruler, Sheikh Mansour assumed the role of managing “unseemly and unsightly yet important strongmen” in various places, as one former senior U.S. official put it.
In Libya, the favored strongman was Khalifa Hifter, a one-time C.I.A. asset who promised to fill the chaotic vacuum left by the death of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, Libya’s leader. Just as importantly, Mr. Hifter was opposed to Islamist groups.
From about 2015, American officials noticed that Sheikh Mansour was regularly speaking with Mr. Hifter, and quietly “handling” the relationship, several U.S. officials said. “That’s when we realized the Emiratis were putting their money” on Mr. Hifter, one official recalled.
The alliance caused some friction with Washington. Emirati weapons poured into Libya, in breach of an international arms embargo. Even some American weapons that had been sold to the Emirates showed up in Libya, a senior official said. In 2020, the Pentagon said the Emirates had most likely paid for mercenaries from Russia’s Wagner Group to fight alongside Mr. Hifter as he attacked the Libyan capital.
But there was little public blowback for the Emirates, which by then had turned its attention to another strategically valuable country: Sudan.
There, the longtime ruler, President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, was allied with Iran, a fierce competitor with many Arab states for influence in the region. Sheikh Mansour was tasked with wooing him to the Emirati side, Sudanese and American officials said. A series of back-channel meetings culminated in 2017 with a high-profile visit by Mr. al-Bashir to Abu Dhabi.
Soon, billions in Emirati aid was flowing into Sudan, according to Emirati state media.
Many American officials were appalled. Mr. al-Bashir was wanted by the International Criminal Court at The Hague for his role in the genocide in Darfur a decade earlier. For the Emirates, though, it was a fruitful alliance: Mr. al-Bashir deployed troops to Yemen to fight alongside the Emirates and Saudi Arabia in their war against the Iran-backed Houthis.
That was also the start of a new relationship. Many of the troops sent to Yemen belonged to the R.S.F., which was then a recently formed paramilitary group led by General Hamdan.
The general quickly became a close ally of Sheikh Mansour.
“We always understood that, behind the scenes on Sudan, lay Mansour,” said Jeffrey Feltman, the U.S. envoy to the Horn of Africa from 2021 to 2022.
‘Gatsbys’ of the Gulf
When he is not dealing with warlords or soccer teams, Sheikh Mansour is known to indulge in luxuries that only the ultra rich can afford.
By many accounts, he has owned several of the world’s biggest superyachts — floating palaces with opulent interiors. His latest, according to yachting industry reports, is the $600 million Blue. Some argue that it is named after the Manchester City colors and, at 525 feet, the vessel is far longer than any field the team has ever played on.
A decade ago, Sheikh Mansour’s taste in boats attracted the attention of American prosecutors, who said he funded another yacht, the Topaz, with the proceeds of the infamous 1MDB scandal.
At least $4.5 billion of Malaysian public money was embezzled through an elaborate financial scheme, the U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said in 2016. She called it “the largest kleptocracy case” the United States had ever seen. A slew of criminal prosecutions led to the conviction and imprisonment of Malaysia’s prime minister, Najib Razak, as well as two senior Wall Street executives, one of whom was sentenced in May.
Media attention in the case initially focused on the splashy habits of Jho Low, the fugitive financier accused of orchestrating the scheme — celebrity parties in Las Vegas, real estate in Beverly Hills and paintings by Picasso and Monet. But it also led to investigations in about a dozen countries, which eventually surfaced serious accusations against senior Emirati officials, including Sheikh Mansour.
At one trial in New York in 2022, American prosecutors presented evidence that the Emirati ambassador to Washington, Yousef al-Otaiba, had received $40 million in bribes. Nearly half a billion dollars went to Khadem al-Qubaisi, the chief executive of one of Sheikh Mansour’s companies, the prosecutors said.
Although prosecutors did not say how much Sheikh Mansour may have received, they listed him as a “co-conspirator” in the fraud and, citing Mr. Low, placed him at the top of a “hierarchy of bribes” in the case.
They also presented evidence showing that $161 million of 1MDB funds were used to repay a loan for Sheikh Mansour’s $688 million yacht, the Topaz. In 2013, Sheikh Mansour vacationed on the yacht with Mr. Razak, the Malaysian leader, in the south of France, a Malaysian anti-corruption official told a court in January.
A year later, the actor Leonardo DiCaprio used the yacht during the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.
Sheikh Mansour has never faced charges related to 1MDB, although in 2023, two of his companies agreed to repay $1.8 billion to Malaysia, which accused them of facilitating the fraud. Mr. al-Otaiba, who remains the Emirati ambassador to Washington, enjoys diplomatic immunity from prosecution, officials said.
Mr. al-Qubaisi, the former chief executive of one of Sheikh Mansour’s companies, was convicted of fraud in the Emirates and is serving a 15-year prison sentence. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal in 2019, he said he had been made a “scapegoat” by Sheikh Mansour.
Sheikh Mansour, Mr. al-Otaiba and Mr. DiCaprio declined to answer questions about 1MDB.
Several American officials involved in the case, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss legally privileged discussions, expressed frustration that Sheikh Mansour and the Emirates did not cooperate with their investigation.
“There’s enough that points to Mansour,” said Clare Rewcastle Brown, an author of two books on the 1MDB scandal. “But it’s clear that nobody wants to touch him.”
Critics said the episode was typical of the privilege enjoyed by Emirati leaders, whose immense wealth has often shielded them. Stephanie Williams, a veteran U.S. diplomat who led the U.N. mission to Libya, compared them with the fictional protagonists of “The Great Gatsby.”
“They come and wreak havoc with their money and carelessness,” Ms. Williams said, paraphrasing a line from the classic American novel. “And then they leave other people to clean up their mess.”
The Khartoum Connection
When General Hamdan helped seize power in a coup in Sudan in 2021, American officials were furious. They had been assured that civilians, not the military, would govern the country.
But the Emirates approved of the takeover, and soon gave General Hamdan a warm official welcome in Abu Dhabi.
The Emirates was on its way to surpassing even China as the biggest foreign deal maker in Africa. Companies led by the al-Nahyan family have poured billions into African mines, data centers and carbon credits as the Gulf country seeks to wean its economy off oil.
Yet for a handful of strategically located nations, the Emirates has also acted as an arms-supplying kingmaker.
In 2021, Sheikh Mohammed rescued the beleaguered prime minister of Ethiopia, Abiy Ahmed, by supplying drones that helped to turn the tide of a brutal civil war in his favor.
And when Sudan collapsed into civil war in 2023, the Emirates sided firmly with Sheikh Mansour’s ally, General Hamdan.
The Emirates denies backing either side in Sudan’s war. But from the earliest days of the conflict, the United States learned that the Emirates was sheltering General Hamdan in Abu Dhabi and arming his fighters in the field, U.S. officials said.
First, General Hamdan flew to the Emirates, where he was given sanctuary in a protected residence and recorded videotaped speeches to supporters in Sudan, American officials said. Soon after, the Emirates mounted a covert scheme to arm General Hamdan’s group, the R.S.F., from a desert air base in eastern Chad.
The general’s appeal to the Emirates was threefold, U.S. officials said. He was loyal because he had fought for the Emiratis in Yemen. He was cooperative because his businesses were based in the Emirates, where he sold gold and bought weapons. And he was a self-proclaimed enemy of Islamist groups.
Using phone intercepts, American intelligence agencies determined that General Hamdan enjoyed a direct line to two leaders of the Emirates — Sheikh Mohammed and Sheikh Mansour, officials said. They also identified an Emirati official who coordinated a network of shell companies that helped to fund and arm the general’s forces.
Once the war began, Sheikh Mansour appeared to cut public ties with General Hamdan, but a connection remained.
The Emirates sent weapons to the general’s forces via an air base in Chad, where they were ostensibly running a field hospital funded by two charities, both controlled or overseen by Sheikh Mansour. Neither charity responded to questions for this story.
In 2024, the U.S. envoy to Sudan, Tom Perriello, confronted Sheikh Mansour about his support for the general during a meeting in the Emirates, one U.S. official said. Sheikh Mansour deflected the charge, saying the onus for peace lay with his enemies.
‘Trial of the Century’
In late 2023, in a major boost to the Emirates’ ambitions in global media, Sheikh Mansour struck a $600 million deal to buy The Daily Telegraph newspaper, a bastion of the British conservative establishment.
But less than six months later, the British government blocked the deal with a new law restricting foreign ownership of newspapers. One lawmaker said publicly that it was impossible “to separate sheikh and state.” The culture secretary, Lucy Frazer, raised concerns about “free expression and accurate presentation of news.”
Sheikh Mansour has encountered other setbacks since then.
In September, Manchester City began to defend itself at a hearing in London that cast doubt on its blistering run of victories.
The Premier League accuses Manchester City of breaking its rules 130 times, including by funneling hundreds of millions of dollars from Emirati companies into the team’s coffers and disguising those payments as sponsorship deals.
The proceedings have been described as the “trial of the century” by British sports media. The Premier League is arguably Britain’s largest cultural export, making the dispute with Sheikh Mansour’s team hugely costly and potentially damaging.
The stakes extend beyond sport. Emirati officials raised the inquiry during talks with the British foreign secretary, David Lammy, during a visit to the Emirates last year, according to people with knowledge of the meeting. The issue has become a “running sore” between the two countries, said Eddie Lister, a former British envoy to the Gulf.
In Washington, growing disquiet over the Emirati role in Sudan’s war has become a bipartisan issue in Congress. At his confirmation hearing in January, Marco Rubio, now the U.S. secretary of state, criticized the Emirates, accusing the country of supporting a “genocide” led by General Hamdan. Prominent Democrats have pressed for a ban on U.S. weapons sales to the Emirates until it stops arming General Hamdan’s Rapid Support Forces.
Those calls increased in May after the R.S.F. bombed fuel depots, power plants and Sudan’s last international airport, using powerful drones that two former U.S. officials said had been provided by the Emirates.
But some of the criticism was drowned out days after, when President Trump visited the Emirates.
At the sweeping, marble presidential palace in Abu Dhabi, Mr. Trump reveled in the extravagant reception as he signed a $200 billion artificial intelligence deal with the country, adding to earlier Emirati pledges to invest $1.4 trillion in the United States.
“You are a magnificent man, and it’s an honor to be with you,” Mr. Trump said to Sheikh Mohammed.
Seated next to them was Sheikh Mansour, whose Mubadala wealth fund had said it would use a Trump family crypto venture to make a $2 billion transaction that stands to generate hundreds of millions of dollars for the president’s family.
Days later, the Trump administration bypassed Congress and approved another $1 billion in weapons for the Emirates.
Declan Walsh is the chief Africa correspondent for The Times based in Nairobi, Kenya. He previously reported from Cairo, covering the Middle East, and Islamabad, Pakistan.
Tariq Panja is a global sports correspondent, focusing on stories where money, geopolitics and crime intersect with the sports world.
The post The Sheikh Who Conquered Soccer and Coddles Warlords appeared first on New York Times.
