Paul Dickov and the United Arab Emirates
- 4 hours ago
- 7 min read
By Gary Oswald.
On the 30th of May 1999 in Wembley Stadium, one of the most important moments in British sport happened. It was the 94th minute of a 90-minute Association Football game, with the score at 2-1. Five minutes had been awarded for stoppage time and so in desperation, with only a minute of the game left, the trailing team played a long ball forward and it fell to one of their strikers. His shot, however, was blocked by a defender and so the ball spun wildly across the penalty box. Only two men could possibly reach it, Paul Dickov and Darren Carr, and one would get there slightly before the other.
The result of that tussle would change English football forever.
In our reality Paul Dickov, the forward, got there first. He shot and scored, equalising the game at 2-2 with less than a minute left to go, completing a remarkable comeback that saw his team, Manchester City, come from 2-0 down to 2-2 in the last five minutes of the game. Extra time remained goalless and despite Dickov missing a penalty in the shootout, his goalkeeper Nicky Weaver saved three of Gillingham’s efforts to see City win the shootout, the game, and promotion from the third flight of English football to the second.
Manchester City are one of England’s biggest clubs and in 1999, they had won two Leagues, six domestic cups, and one European trophy. Their last trophy however had come back in 1976 and they had gone through a low point in their history, due to financial worries and two relegations – the first one because in darkly comic fashion, their players were falsely instructed to play for a draw when they needed a win to stay up because of misinformation about results elsewhere – taking them from the first ever time to the English third flight. They were, probably, the most successful team in all of Europe at this point to be playing in that low of a division.
As such, and given that they had a manager, FA Cup Winner Joe Royle, and players who had worked at higher levels and a fan base that meant they played in front of more than twice as many paying spectators as any other team in that league, they were expected to win the third flight with ease. However, despite both Dickov and his strike partner Shaun Goater scoring 15 plus goals each, City scored less goals than their promotion rivals and while they only lost 8 games, they struggled to turn draws into wins, finishing only third. As a result, instead of getting promoted automatically, they went into a four team play off for that last spot against Gillingham, Wigan, and Preston. Only by beating Gillingham at Wembley did they get promoted.
Manchester City would ride that momentum further in the next season, finishing 2nd in the second flight thanks to a wonderful season for Shaun Goater, and thus returned to the top flight. While they were relegated in their first attempt in the Premier League, they would soon ambitiously appoint former England manager Kevin Keegan and return again in the next year, this time to stay.
In 2003 they moved from their old stadium of Maine Road, into the state-of-the-art City of Manchester Stadium, allowing them to have one of the highest home attendances in the Premier League. In 2004 they qualified for Europe for the first time since 1979 and in 2007 they were bought by Thai Billionaire and Prime Minister, Thaksin Shinawatra.
And then in the Summer of 2008, Shinawatra wife was convicted of fraud in the Thai courts and after they skipped bail, the couple’s assets were frozen. Suddenly Manchester City could no longer pay their bills, they needed a new owner and they needed one fast.
Fortunately, thanks to their Premier League status and massive fan base & stadium, they were an attractive buy. Enter Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, current Vice President of the United Arab Emirates and a man heavily involved in the UAE’s empire building in Africa in terms of their alliances with various warlords in Libya, Sudan, and Somalia. He bought out Shinawatra and took control of the club.
Now one of the richest clubs in the world, Manchester City have invested hugely in their infrastructure and academy as well as hiring the best coaches and players in the world. Since 2008, they have won eight League titles, nine domestic cups and one more European trophy. But that only scratches the surface as to just how dominant they have been. They won four leagues in a row (something no other team in English history has ever done), won two different trebles (three different trophies in one season), and broke a points record for the Top flight during a season where they won 32 out of 38 games.
English football was made to step up to this new relentless winners, with their rivals posting unheard-of point scores just to finish 2nd. Managers like Pep Guardiola and players like Kevin de Bruyne and Erling Haaland came to England to play for City and are some of the best to ever work in this country. Without them, the top flight of England would be massively different. It is perhaps a little far-fetched to talk about it as a form of footballing imperialism, the capture of English sport by the UAE, but undeniably the UAE’s government, one involved in massacres in Africa, have had a huge impact on the modern sport, something they clearly thinks helps them in terms of reputation.
And that trick pulled off by Sheikh Mansour of massive investment in a midtable club to raise his own reputation is not one that can be repeated now thanks to new financial rulings that limit spending compared to income. Changes that Man City, which thanks to their success now as one of the highest incomes of any club in the world, voted for (though they are currently fighting a court case about whether that income is legitimate or they have cooked the books).
Paul Dickov, a relatively obscure figure, has recently found himself increasingly celebrated by City Fans as instead the first brick in that wall of success. He said himself that was only after City started winning leagues that his goal began mattering to people.
On the other side of the coin Gillingham, who lost the game, went into massive infighting. Their coach, Tony Pulis, was sacked a month later for alleged gross misconduct, so he then sued Gillingham for slander and unpaid wages. Gillingham’s chairman, Paul Scally, would later be charged by the FA as it was found he had placed three bets on his team to beat Manchester City in that game with which he hoped to fund his team’s adventures in the second flight if they won. Pulis would have ill-fated stints at Bristol City and Portsmouth before ending up at Stoke and spending ten years there, in a mini golden age for that club, seeing them establish themselves in the Premier League with Pulis managing in that league for the first time in 2008-09, the first season Manchester City were owned by the Abu Dhabi group.
So, what happens if instead of Dickov reaching that loose ball, Darren Carr does and Gillingham see the game out?
Scally’s bets come in, and Pulis gets his money and has a crack at the second flight, and maybe an earlier first shot at the Premier League.
But Manchester City are in deep financial problems, having not bounced back on their first attempt and with an essentially still top level coach and players. They will need to cut cost massively, selling the likes of Goater and Dickov and probably sacking Joe Royle. There was genuine worry about the club going bust, though I think that is unlikely due to fan goodwill, but they possibly stay a few years in the third flight, like Leeds and Sunderland do later. If they do make it back to the top flight, it is probably significantly later and sees them miss out on the City of Manchester Stadium. Without that, the UAE almost certainly never take them over and suddenly that collection of talent in Manchester City never happens.
Which gives us two options. One is a much more competitive title picture without the super team of Manchester City dominating it. Or two, Sheikh Mansour buys someone else and the super team simply moves.
In terms of stadium and attendances, the two other obvious sleeping giants in the Premier League in 2007-08 are Newcastle and Sunderland, with Everton suffering from the lack of a new stadium and Aston Villa recently bought by Randy Lerner who had no desire to sell until 2014. There were rumours of interest in Chelsea, but their Russian oligarch owner hadn’t had his wealth frozen in Russia and so had no reason to sell. Even if we assume that Gillingham made it all the way to the Prem in this timeline, they lack the fanbase to be part of this conversation.
The most likely option is Newcastle, who would instead be bought out a few years later by a group funded by the Saudi Royal Family, a move which combined with Mansour’s purchase of Man City led to a blanket ban on further purchases of English clubs by nation states in British law. One of the reasons why English clubs were targeted prior to the new financial laws is they are completely privately owned companies rather than having rules about fan ownership that clubs in continental Europe often have and so Mansour had much more freedom of action. It might be in this world, Pep Guardiola manages Newcastle United to four League titles in a row and Sunderland fans swap their newfound geopolitical knowledge from Yemen to Sudan.
But the Mansour deal to buy Manchester City seemed very opportunistic, based on the problems Thaksin Shinawatra, who would be a guest in the UAE after his exile from Thailand, was suffering. It’s equally possible that without that opportunity, Mansour simply never gets involved in English Football at all.
Without ever knowing it, Paul Dickov possibly did an awful lot for the PR department of the UAE.
Gary Oswald is the editor of the Grapeshot and Guillotines, Emerald Isles, and If We'd Just Got That Penalty anthologies.
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