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.

Had the football club not become a serial champion and the dominant force in the English game, its [fall from grace] wouldn’t have made such an attention-grabbing global controversy. This is the double-edged sword of using such investments to raise and shape the international profile of autocratic states, a practice known pejoratively as “sportswashing.”