Man City’s Abu Dhabi owners will pay just £33,000 extra in rent on their taxpayer-owned stadium following an expansion expected to earn them around £11m per year, The i Paper can reveal.

The decision comes amid increasing scrutiny of the relationship between local leaders and City’s ultra-rich owners, whose financial cheating risks seeing the club thrown out of the Premier League.

The council has been accused of giving “sweetheart” deals to the football club’s owners that may have left taxpayers shortchanged.

The i Paper previously revealed the council sold the stadium’s naming rights to the club for £750,000 a year, which it then sold on to UAE-owned Etihad Airways for £10m a year.

City have been paying around £4.4m per year to rent the stadium, despite generating matchday revenues of more than £75m from ticket sales, merchandise and corporate hospitality.

By comparison, West Ham paid £4.6m to rent their taxpayer-owned London Stadium last year against matchday revenue of £39m.

Clubs including Arsenal, Spurs and Everton have paid more than £1bn each to build their own stadiums.

The new rental agreement came following the Abu Dhabi-funded expansion of the stadium to more than 60,000 seats and the addition of a new ‘entertainment destination’ featuring  a Radisson Blu Hotel, at a total cost of £300m.

The council said in August that it would be seeking to “vary” the lease to reflect the increased revenue which will be generated by the expansion.

A report quietly published last month confirmed negotiations were complete but did not give any further details.

Following inquiries from The i Paper, Manchester Council has revealed that Man City paid £4.4m in rent to the council for the 2025-26 season when home attendances averaged 52,517.

With the expansion of the North Stand by around 7,000 seats, City could potential earn around an extra £11m a season based on the £75m earned via matchday revenue last year.

But the lease variation will see the basic annual rent for the stadium go up by only £33,000 – plus an annual increase linked to inflation.

This represents a rental increase of less than 1 per cent.

Manchester council points out that it has also negotiated two new separate leases related to the development of the City Square fanzone and Medlock Square hotel and restaurant complex which will be worth £252,000 per year and is £35,680 per year respectively.

Reform group leader on Manchester council Sian Astley suggested the updated deal represents poor value for taxpayers.

She said: “The sheer increase in bums on stadium seats would suggest the rent is way under what it should be.

“Who did actually do our negotiating? Because councillors were never informed, there was no scrutiny of these decisions, or discussion of them. We’re all very aware now that this is how things are done in Manchester – behind closed doors.”

Labour figures in Manchester have repeatedly denied that Man City’s owners have been given favourable treatment.

Concerns have been raised about an alleged ‘sweetheart’ deal that gave Manchester Life  – a joint property venture between the council and City’s owners – first refusal over a swathe of land near the stadium.

Analysis by experts at the University of Sheffield in 2022 suggested the price Manchester Life paid for publicly-owned land tended to be lower than the price paid by other developers.

Manchester Life was exempted from requirements to build affordable housing in any of its developments and was also given £55m in taxpayer loans from a fund operated by the Greater Manchester Combined Authority in 2017 despite being controlled by Sheikh Mansour, a member of one of the world’s wealthiest families.

Many of these arrangements were made at the same time as Man City were deliberately inflating the amount of revenue they were able to generate each year through ‘sham’ sponsorship deals, according to an independent Premier League commission.

Among them is the deal Etihad Airways first signed in 2011, which also led to the renaming of the then City of Manchester Stadium. The i Paper revealed the original terms of the deal were that Manchester council would receive 50 per cent of any naming rights revenue – but only up to a cap of £750,000, which would rise each year with inflation.

Man City’s 10-year deal with Etihad Airways was reportedly worth as much as £400m of which the stadium naming rights element was said to be worth at least £100m.

But the Premier League commission says that in reality sponsors such as Etihad only paid a fraction of such amounts to City, and the rest was topped up by their Abu Dhabi owners.

The council says it has received at least £14m as a result of the naming rights deal which was also renewed in 2021 on improved terms.

Anti-Abu Dhabi emails ‘blocked’ from councillors

Astley’s concerns about a lack of transparency have been heightened after Manchester City Council was accused of ‘blocking’ emails sent to councillors – including herself – about taxpayer-funded housing loans awarded to Abu Dhabi.

She was among a number of Greater Manchester political leaders contacted by Ben Rose, a local property agent who has been a high-profile critic of the council and mayoral office over their development deals for many years.

Rose offered what he believed would be relevant information to members of the mayoral authority’s scrutiny committee, chaired by Lib Dem councillor John Leech, which has pledged to investigate loans awarded to a number of developers, including Man City’s owners, while Burnham was in charge.

However, the email did not arrive and it later emerged all emails from Rose to any council email addresses are being automatically forwarded to the authority’s chief legal adviser Fiona Ledden

The i Paper has seen correspondence in which Ledden argues she is required to screen all emails from Rose because of ongoing legal action related to his client, a property developer called Weis Group, against the GMCA.

“I know that emails were blocked from being delivered to me without my knowledge and that is unacceptable,” said Astley.

Manchester council said the emails “clearly relate to matters linked to potential litigation and as such it is appropriate that such correspondence should not be widely disseminated to officers and members within the council”.

City strongly deny the ruling by an independent commission that they breached more than 100 financial rules by falsely inflating sponsorship deals over nine seasons and have submitted an appeal.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham, the former mayor of Greater Manchester, attracted criticism for suggesting he would be “really concerned” if City’s owners sell up as a result of the furore.

Burnham and Manchester council leaders have denied any wrongdoing and pledged to be transparent about all dealings with City’s owners.