Sheikh Jassim: Manchester United suitor and ‘the elite of the elite’

S heikh Jassim bin Hamad al-Thani has been to a number of Manchester United matches as a supporter. Some of those have even been away (perhaps the Carabao Cup quarter-final at Bristol City in 2017 – who knows?). This much is confirmed.

Much more about a man who hopes to be the next owner of the 20-times English champions is difficult to establish. Sheikh Jassim is not someone who courts attention; his details are not freely available online. The company hired at great expense to publicise his bid cannot even confirm his age.

All of which makes him almost the perfect figurehead for an offer that has reignited debate over the involvement of Qatar in football and its substantial presence in the UK. Can Sheikh Jassim really be an independently wealthy United fan with access to the billions necessary for a takeover, or is he just a face for the policy objectives of the Qatari state?

Maybe it’s a bit of both. Geoff Harkness is a US academic and the author of Changing Qatar, a portrait of a country undergoing “rapid modernisation”.

Though Sheikh Jassim and the emir, Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, are not closely related, Harkness argues it would not be wrong to suspect links between the two. “I would say that those are probably valid concerns given how things work in Qatar and the relationship between the al-Thani ‘family’ and the state, which is effectively one and the same but not entirely,” he says.

“The question that I would ask is whether this is a unified attempt within the al-Thani ‘family’ … or whether this represents a split within the ‘family’, that they are competing by doing this outside of [the sovereign wealth fund] the Qatar Investment Authority.

“These guys all compete with each other: they want to buy the biggest