Within the space of a month, two of the wealthiest ownership groups in world sport ran into something they are rarely asked to confront: consequences. The NBA punished the Los Angeles Clippers and their owner Steve Ballmer for circumventing its salary cap, and Manchester City were found guilty of more than 100 charges of cheating the Premier League’s financial regulations. Taken together, the two cases amount to a rare instance of industrial-scale cheating being called out on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Clippers case was settled first. On 2 September, the NBA released the findings of its investigation, concluding that the franchise and Ballmer had paid star forward Kawhi Leonard $28m off the books for a no-show job with a supposed sponsor, a mechanism designed to sidestep the league’s salary cap. The sanctions were severe: the Clippers were docked five first-round picks and fined $30m, while Ballmer — the ninth richest man in the world — was suspended from any involvement with his team for a year.
The club’s initial response was combative. In a statement, the Clippers said they “vehemently reject the NBA’s findings, which are the result of a heavily biased investigation seeking to justify a predetermined narrative rather than facts and evidence”. They then accepted the punishment. The findings followed a year-long investigation by the journalist Pablo Torre and his podcast, Pablo Torre Finds Out, which unfolded its reporting across several episodes and won a Pulitzer Prize for the work. The reporting had met deep scepticism along the way, including from Mark Cuban, the Dallas Mavericks minority owner, who had posted: “I’m on Team Ballmer. Steve isn’t that dumb.” It is also worth recalling how Ballmer came to own the Clippers at all: he was only allowed to buy the team once its previous owner, Donald Sterling, was more or less expelled from the league over racist comments — another of the rare occasions when an owner has been pushed back, particularly by his own kind.
Manchester City’s reckoning arrived last week. The club were found guilty of more than 100 charges of cheating the Premier League’s financial regulations between 2009 and 2018, and of obstructing the subsequent investigation between 2019 and 2023. City have not reached the apology stage, insisting on their innocence as they have throughout and maintaining an aggressively defiant posture. Yet on any of the plausible routes this now takes — and several more years of appeals and lawsuits are to be expected — the club’s Abu Dhabi ownership looks set to emerge bruised. A footballing body of work built on untold billions of investment, which turned a humdrum club into a world-beating one, will have been tarnished. If the purpose of the project was a soft-power public relations play by an oil-rich nation state, it will have backfired catastrophically: whatever comes next, the club will be remembered for cheating on a colossal scale and for subverting both the world’s most popular sporting competition and a British cultural institution for almost a decade.
Writing on the two cases, Leander Schaerlaeckens sets out the familiar sequence that billionaire exposure to accountability tends to follow: first vociferous denial; then bafflement that such an earthly, proletarian problem should be allowed to happen to a titan of industry and pillar of society; then a milquetoast non-apology apology “for the distraction and distress this matter has caused”, issued after a total and belligerent denial through proxies. What the fourth stage looks like, he concedes, is not yet known.
The scarcity of such outcomes is what gives them their weight. Schaerlaeckens points to the case of New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, who was allegedly caught paying for sex in a Florida massage parlour, and for whom prosecutors dropped the charge. He also cites the current position of New York Knicks owner James Dolan, who faces a lawsuit from a former employee over discrimination in which it is alleged he illegally spied on the team’s own fans — reporting that also came from Torre — and judges it unlikely Dolan will ever feel any effects from the accusations. Beyond sport, he notes, the examples are even more numerous.
Time will probably mark out the Clippers and Manchester City cases as outliers. For now, that is exactly what makes them notable. People of power and means running into the consequences of their own decisions is, in this context, a genuine novelty — and a rare one.