Revealed: Khaldoon Al Mubarak held Elliot Anderson talks with Evangelos Marinakis at UEFA dinner to launch £116M talks | OneFootball

Manchester City chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak held initial discussions with Nottingham Forest owner Evangelos Marinakis over the signing of Elliot Anderson at a UEFA dinner before the 2026 Champions League final.

The revelation adds a new layer of detail to one of the most complex transfer negotiations of the summer window, with the behind-the-scenes account of how the deal began now matching the drama of the weeks that followed as Manchester City and Nottingham Forest worked to find common ground on a deal structure that satisfied one and all.

Marinakis had long been identified within City’s hierarchy as a potentially difficult negotiating counterpart, with officials at the Etihad Stadium understanding that the Greek shipping magnate would pursue the highest possible return for a player he regarded as one of the finest midfielders in the Premier League.

Manchester City had been wary that dealing with Marinakis could prove difficult, a concern that was quickly validated when the Forest owner returned from the initial Al Mubarak conversation and demanded more money than had been discussed at the dinner, setting the tone for a negotiation that would test the patience of all parties involved over the weeks that followed.

Report: Marinakis demanded £126M as City’s UCL add-on preference was rejected

According to The Athletic’s Sam Lee and Laurie Whitwell, Marinakis initially demanded a deal for Anderson worth £126 million in total – structured as £106 million upfront, supplemented by £20 million in add-ons he considered easily achievable, including bonuses tied to the midfielder playing a certain number of games.

That structure reflected Marinakis’s desire to frame the bonuses as near-certainties rather than aspirational targets, ensuring the total package would effectively function as a guaranteed £126 million rather than a headline fee with speculative add-ons attached.

Manchester City’s counter-preference was for add-ons tied to winning the UEFA Champions League – a competition City have won before and regard as a realistic ambition for a club of their stature – but one that Forest firmly rejected as insufficiently realistic from their own perspective, given the disparity between the two clubs’ standing at European level.

That impasse over the structure of the bonuses became one of the central sticking points in a negotiation that also saw a player-plus-cash arrangement explored and ultimately shelved, before City CEO Ferran Soriano eventually stepped in to agree a guaranteed £116 million with no add-ons attached – a figure that fell below Marinakis’s initial £126 million demand but removed entirely the dispute over bonus structure that had threatened to derail the deal.

What does the UEFA dinner reveal about how Man City’s biggest transfers get done?

The image of two club chairmen opening transfer negotiations at a European football dinner – before a ball had been kicked in any competitive context that summer – speaks to the informal but consequential channels through which the game’s most significant business is often initiated, with relationships and personal conversations frequently doing more to set the parameters of a deal than any formal bid.

Al Mubarak’s willingness to engage Marinakis directly at that early stage reflected Manchester City’s genuine and urgent desire to secure Anderson’s signature ahead of a summer window in which multiple bids were launched and rejected at working level, with the chairman’s intervention suggesting that those within City’s hierarchy understood that progress on the deal required engagement at a level equivalent to Marinakis’s own.

The gap between Marinakis’ £126 million opening position and the £116 million guaranteed fee that was ultimately agreed represents a meaningful concession from the Forest owner on the total value of the deal, though his insistence on a clean, add-on-free structure ultimately prevailed over City’s preference for a package that distributed some of the risk into performance-related payments.

That outcome says as much about the relative negotiating leverage of the two clubs as it does about the individuals involved – with Marinakis’s willingness to consider selling elsewhere for less, as previously reported, providing him with a credible alternative that strengthened his hand throughout a process that produced one of the most revealing glimpses into the mechanics of elite transfer negotiations seen this summer.