A scary number of people on here are too young to remember but no one called City’s takeover state ownership at the time. Sheikh Mansour bought the club and it wasn’t until 3 or 4 years later, probably with the Qatar purchase of PSG that people started referring to City as the same thing.

Go back to 2008 and all the coverage is about the individual Sheikh Mansour, there was no sense that the UAE state had bought a football team.