Man City Is a $1 Billion Sportswashing Lesson

Sometimes you can be too successful. “You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off,” Michael Caine tells an over-enthusiastic explosives specialist in The Italian Job, a heist movie that ends with a coach loaded with gold bullion hanging over a precipice. The Manchester City sports-diplomacy bus, laden with more than $1 billion of allegedly illicit wealth from Abu Dhabi, is also perched on a cliff edge.