If ever there was a portrayal of a victim mentality and culture - its the Man City fan base.
Media against them, refs against them, UEFA against them, VAR against them, the police against them, SKY/BBC/BT against them, the press against them, FFP against them, everyone and everything - against them.
They need to re-amend their faux stance and smell the coffee, on who really is always playing the victim.
They love defending Abu Dhabi though
As the Australian Simon Pearce, a director of Manchester City and Abu Dhabi's head of strategic communications, put it in a leaked email written in 2013 regarding the club's move to New York: "AD/UAE vulnerabilities put in play: gay, wealth, women, Israel."
The success, then, of Manchester City has also brought some fresh attention to long-standing criticisms of the UAE. "This is one of the most abusive and dangerous governments out there," says McGeehan. "They are particularly sinister and dangerous."
Serious mistreatment of the migrant workers that make up 90% of the population, vast inequalities in wealth, environmental degradation, oppressive policies aimed at women and gay people, torturing prisoners and embarking on a war that has killed thousands of innocent people in Yemen: all these allegations against the UAE have been brought, however hazily, to the attention of some of the hundreds of millions of people that watch the English Premier League around the world.
This is particularly true for fans of City's rivals looking for a stick to beat their conqueror with, and particularly true in an ever more polarised football landscape, in which fan sites and podcasts have risen to prominence and supporters across the world vent at each other on Twitter.
In return, fans of the Manchester club have become what McGeehan calls an "unpaid PR army" for Abu Dhabi, defending the UAE on social media and pointing out that when it comes to supposedly dodgy owners of Premier League football clubs, City are very much not alone.
"Dig deep enough and you'll find murky business in every club's financial dealings – where there's money, there's a lot of questionable characters and practices," says David Mooney, a life-long City fan and host of the Blue Moon podcast.
Fellow fan Howard Hockin, who runs the 93:20 podcast, makes a similar point. "The UK government is just as bad as the UAE government. There is a lot of Western arrogance surrounding this," he says.
In Manchester, the men of oil-rich Abu Dhabi get a lot more love than that UK government. From time to time, City fans in the Etihad break out a chant that pays homage to their owner. To the tune of spiritual classic Kum Ba Ya, they sing "Sheikh Mansour m'lord, Sheikh Mansour, oh lord, Sheikh Mansour".
Mansour has attended one Manchester City game during more than a decade of ownership.
A Gulf state whose territory was once controlled by the British, the UAE is now calling the shots, its rulers thanked and honoured by men and women at a football ground in the north of England.
But as it aims to make domestic football history, Manchester City face another kind of off-field headache, as Europe's footballing body, UEFA ,threatens to ban it from the Champions League for violating financial fair play regulations by funnelling Sheikh Mansour's money through inflated sponsorship deals. The giant of east Manchester is being forced to swat away assorted slings and arrows.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/big-story/manchester-city-abu-dhabi-football