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MLS commissioner Don Garber suggested the league was unlikely to investigate New York City FC’s Abu Dhabi-based majority owners, who have been implicated in Manchester City’s guilty verdict for breaching Premier League financial regulations.
“We’re not in the business of looking [at] what our team owners do in other leagues,” Garber said while speaking at the Front Office Sports Tuned In summit in New York. “And frankly, I don’t think any league would view what other owners do when they have multiple investments throughout other sports.”
NYCFC and Manchester City are both owned by City Football Group, a holding company run by Abu Dhabi royal family member Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan.
In late September, the Premier League announced that an independent commission had found Manchester City guilty of serious financial breaches. The league said that, between 2009 and 2018, City artificially inflated its revenue and reduced its costs by more than 900 million pounds by entering into “sham” sponsorship contracts that were partially funded by the club’s owners.
Misrepresenting its revenue and costs allowed City to skirt the league’s Profitability and Sustainability Rules, which limited how much money a club could lose over a rolling three-year period. City is appealing the verdict.
Mansour bought City in 2008, and he and club CEO Ferran Soriano founded City Football Group in 2013 with the vision of adding clubs around the globe to the club’s ownership portfolio, starting with NYCFC. In May 2013, City joined forces with the Yankees to launch NYCFC as an MLS expansion team.
The New York outfit was branded nearly identically to its parent club, with the same sky-blue home kit and primary shirt sponsor, Etihad Airways.
The two clubs coordinated multiple player transfers in NYCFC’s early years. Frank Lampard was announced as one of NYCFC’s first signings in 2014, joining from Chelsea. But after it later emerged that he had never signed an MLS contract, City used him for a season before he settled on American soil, upsetting some fans of the nascent New York franchise.
City Football Group holds an 80% stake in NYCFC, while Yankee Global Enterprises and businessman Marcelo Claure each own 10%.
NYCFC is set to open Etihad Park, a new 25,000-seat stadium, next July. The stadium site in Queens is adjacent to Citi Field and the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, and it will be the city’s first soccer-specific stadium.
At Tuned In, Garber praised City Football Group for its investment in the club.
“What NYCFC has done through their ownership, the City Football Group, in investing in our league, building a great team in NYCFC, building an MLS Next Pro Stadium in New Jersey, and obviously their stadium that’ll open up in Queens, is something we’re thankful for and appreciative of,” Garber said.
