I doubt you'd ever get an honest account from a current Abu Dhabi follower. Those that have stayed to follow the club formerly known as Manchester City are clearly ok with what their owners are all about or, at least, happily, willingly and blissfully ignorant about them. I think those who found it repugnant that these monsters have taken over what was their club will have long since binned them off.
What are left are the willfully ignorant and those who couldn't care less. You won't get an honest reply from such people. All you would get if they touched on the subject at all is a weak PR exercise and denial. The thing is, you cannot really defend the indefensible, so the vast majority would swerve the topic.
I've only ever known one City fan and the last I heard was that he binned them off after they were bought out. He used to be a massive fan too, and would get us tickets for Maine Road when we played them there. I suspect plenty of that old school fan will have dropped them too.
The new breed? Well I just can't talk football with them. I can't take them seriously at all. They are just jumped up lottery winners with a ridiculously self-aggrandising attitude and an horrifically large chip on their shoulders.
In a way, it's really sad, because success should be celebrated. Great play should be appreciated. But with that lot, you just can't respect any of it. You cannot take it seriously because it's fake, contrived and hasn't come through hard work. It's all a sick illusion really, and no trophies or records 'won' by them has any credibility whatsoever.
Edit: That's not so say that I have any issue whatsoever with others discussing anything they want with whoever they want, of course. 😊
I'm not sure I fully empathize with your line of reasoning here, so maybe I've misunderstood your stance and if so it's certainly not on purpose. I have never bothered with this debate before, so what's covering new ground for me probably isn't the same for you. However.
We, as football fans, have no control -- essentially whatsoever -- over who owns the clubs. We can, when well organized and with legal rights on our side, affect the outcome to some extent such as with Hicks and Gillette, but it's limited to such an extent that it can be considered irrelevant. For example, the Qatar regime could have been the ones to buy Hicks and Gillette out. If an owner with limitless wealth buys the team you support, there's little you can do about it, organized but especially as an individual. I'm sure that you agree if not in detail then at least in principle.
So what you seem to consider the correct moral stance here is to downright stop following the team you support. As in entirely. Now, I find that odd, because I don't at all feel that I support John Henry and FSG by supporting LFC, they are not even secondary our third in what I consider myself a supporter of. Politically, I stand as far away from them as you could imagine. To support a team is not to condone its ownership, I don't feel at all conflicted in that and I struggle to see why I should. I was here long before they came here, and I'll hopefully be here long after they're gone. And it's completely our of my control. It's probably the same for many Manchester City fans.
Also, I think it's quite a big ask of any person to just completely resign as fan of a club, and all that it represents and entails, due to something that can happen overnight out of ones control. Because, again if I understand your stance correctly, you would stop following, and caring, about Liverpool overnight if our owners are bad enough? And furthermore, since you degrade so many Manchester City fans for not doing so, you surely expect the rest of us to do the same thing? Otherwise, your moral stance is circumstancial and not moral at all. Now, I think you're wrong, I don't believe the entire Liverpool fanbase would shut down the way you seem to argue is the moral thing to do.
Ultimately, I think what you miss in your stance is the definition of supporting a team, and how that can vary from one to another. You seem to, at least in City's case, have a very strict view, as in supporting one side of a club is supporting its entirety. However, there are other ways to view what supporting means and is, and far from all of them include condoning the ownership. The ownership that again is out of ones control as a football fan.
Obviously, there are plenty of Manchester City fans who then in turn do somewhat condone and defend Abu Dhabi, for which there is no excuse. But to ask of fans -- irrational, emotional, heavily invested football fans like ourselves -- to completely abandon a team and an institution so much broader and important than a temporary ownership is, to me anyway, not the moral high ground at all. It's dogmatic, and circumstancial to an extent that it's not entirely believable should the circumstances be different, or indeed opposite.
