Since Manchester City’s purchase by an iAbu Dhabi royal family in 2008, the club has undergone a meteoric rise to the very top of English football. This week however, a more rapid descent may be underway with the opening of the hearing into their 115 alleged breaches of the Premier Leagues financial fair play rules. Regardless of whether the club is guilty, their appearance before the courts could ultimately be a very good thing for all of English football. Their appearance could draw attention to the malpractice and dodgy dealings of all bad actors within the football community, hopefully bringing the lesser known controversies and more controversial figures out into the light. So, in this spirit, allow me to shine a flashlight onto one of these lesser known cases.
The case in question today is that of Sunderland, the Black Cats of North East England. In the early 20th century they stood as one of the great sides in English football, winning six league titles and two FA cups. However, after their back to back relegations from the Premier League and the Championship in 2017 and 2018 respectively, the club was left floundering in the footballing wilderness of League 1. Since then they have had to claw their way back into respectability, and now sit 2nd in England’s second division.
However, one of Sunderland’s owners has drawn questioning eyes as to whether he is the right kind of character that should be near the helm of such a historic club. The minority owner, Juan Sartori, is a Uruguayan businessman turned politician that has been involved with Sunderland since 2018. He was a former Presidential candidate in Uruguay’s 2019 election, however he ultimately didn’t make it to the ballot as he lost in his party’s primaries to the current incumbent of the nation’s highest office, but he has held a seat in their Senate since 2020. Sartori is also the founder and former owner of Union Agriculture Group (UAG), which once held 1% of all Uruguay’s land.
On the surface this appears to be a strong track record of success, showing a man with ambition and drive who knows how to get results. A closer inspection however reveals a somewhat murkier reality. Sartori is currently embroiled in a UK high court case that involves claims of fraud, negligence, and conspiracy against himself and his Union Group International Holdings company. The claim alleges that Sartori repeatedly misled investors into investing into shares of a related company and falsely represented both the value and risk of said investment.
Similarly, Sartori had to leave his leadership position at UAG following accusations that he used his position for personal gain. The allegations claim that he conducted a highly suspect deal in which he advised a client of his separate investment company to purchase shares in a rice company, and then having UAG buy the same shares but at a considerably higher price.
Accusations of fraud are nothing new to Sartori who has a track record of this stretching all the way back to the beginnings of his business career in 2007. Fresh out of college at 26, Sartori owned a blueberry farm that was struggling to attract external investors. His method to counteract this lack of interest was to falsely represent and exaggerate the business to would-be investors, going so far as to claim his partner was the only “agronomist” with a doctorate in the entirety of Uruguay. Unsurprisingly, he then attracted huge investments that allowed his company to grow into the Union Agriculture Group (UAG).
Sartori has gone on to regularly describe himself as a Harvard graduate in the annual reports and other documents that he filed for UAG. Questions began to emerge around the authenticity of this claim as UAG began to prepare to be listed on Wall Street. Eventually, Harvard themselves clarified that Sartori was not a graduate from Harvard and could not rightfully claim to be an alumni of the university.
The reason for highlighting this side of his character is to put perspective over the question mark that hangs over his suitability to be involved with a football club. A man with such a track record should not be in a position of authority at Sunderland, an institution that means so much to so many. To use a rather low-hanging-fruit analogy, if the manager of a team was breaking the rules as flagrantly as tripping up the opposition’s players, you would expect him to receive at least a touchline ban. The same should go for owners. While Sartori may not have committed fraud in the footballing world, he has shown a complete willingness to act outside the rules in every other line of his work.
What we can hope by City appearing before the court is that other clubs will begin to look introspectively and right any wrongs they may see within, before they end up in front of a British judge. Surely the majority owners of Sunderland must be able to recognise the character of Sartori and the perilous position his presence puts both them and the club in.