Manchester City and LA Clippers rulings show billionaire owners can face consequences
On 2 September the NBA announced that the Los Angeles Clippers and owner Steve Ballmer had paid Kawhi Leonard $28m off the books for a no‑show job with a supposed sponsor to circumvent the league’s salary cap, and last week Manchester City was found guilty of more than 100 breaches of Premier League financial regulations from 2009 to 2018 and of obstructing a subsequent investigation from 2019 to 2023.
The spate of verdicts has unfolded amid predictable stages of response from powerful owners: vociferous denial, bafflement that such a problem should befall them, and the thin, later non-apology framed as regret “for the distraction and distress this matter has caused”. Within the last month, those stages have played out in public across two high-profile, billionaire-owned clubs, prompting discussion about whether sporting institutions can impose meaningful penalties on the ultra-rich.
The NBA’s findings on 2 September detailed that the Clippers and Ballmer paid Leonard $28m off the books for a purported sponsor role, a scheme the league said circumvented the salary cap; the Clippers were docked five first‑round picks, fined $30m and Ballmer, the ninth richest man in the world, was suspended from involvement with his team for a year. The Clippers initially issued a statement that 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”, and later accepted the punishments after what the reporting describes as being “caught bang to rights”.
The Clippers case followed a year‑long investigation by journalist Pablo Torre and his podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out, which the article says won a Pulitzer Prize for its work; that reporting met deep skepticism in some quarters, including from Dallas Mavericks minority owner Mark Cuban, who posted “I’m on Team Ballmer,” and added “Steve isn’t that dumb.” Ballmer’s tenure as Clippers owner was noted alongside the franchise’s previous chapter, when its former owner Donald Sterling was, the article says, more or less expelled from the league over racist comments.
Manchester City’s verdict, issued last week, found the club guilty of more than 100 charges of cheating the Premier League’s financial regulations between 2009 and 2018 and of obstructing an investigation from 2019 to 2023. The club has continued to insist on its innocence and is described as taking “an aggressively defiant posture,” with the article stating they are not yet at the stage of offering apologies.
The writer argues that regardless of appeals and legal challenges to come, the city’s Abu Dhabi ownership will emerge from the process bruised and that the club’s entire footballing body of work, backed by large investment, “will have been tarnished.” The piece also asserts that if the project’s purpose was a soft‑power public relations exercise by the oil‑rich nation state, it will have “backfired catastrophically.”
The article places the two cases in a wider pattern of rare occasions when wealthy owners face consequences, contrasting them with examples it says more often end without sanction: Robert Kraft, who was allegedly caught paying for sex in a Florida massage parlour and whose charge was dropped by prosecutors; and the “ridiculous and spiteful New York Knicks owner James Dolan,” who faces a lawsuit by a former employee alleging discrimination and that he spied on fans illegally, a matter the article says was also reported by Torre. It adds that numerous examples exist outside sport, including “a certain resident of the White House, and a lot of his friends and allies.”
Time, the article concludes, will probably frame the Clippers and City cases as outliers, and after several more years of appeals and lawsuits the longer-term consequences for the owners and clubs will become clearer. Leander Schaerlaeckens is the author of The Long Game: US Men’s Soccer and Its Savage, Four-Decade Journey to the Top, or Thereabouts, which is out now. He teaches at Marist University. This is an extract from Soccer Desk, a newsletter from the Guardian US.