Manchester City found guilty of 100-plus financial breaches as billionaire owners face rare accountability moment
Manchester City guilty of more than 100 charges, Clippers owner suspended as sport tests billionaire accountability
Within the last month sport has delivered two high-profile verdicts against billionaire ownership groups, a development commentators say is rare in an era where the ultra-wealthy often operate with limited repercussions.
Manchester City verdict
Last week a Premier League commission found Manchester City guilty of more than 100 charges of cheating the league’s financial regulations from 2009 to 2018 and obstructing the subsequent investigation from 2019 to 2023. The club, owned by Abu Dhabi’s ruling family, has not yet reached the apology stage and is insisting on its innocence while adopting an aggressively defiant posture.
Commentary on the case notes that in any plausible way the outcome plays out, after several more years of appeals and lawsuits, the Abu Dhabi ownership will emerge bruised. The club’s entire footballing body of work, backed by untold billions in investment turning a humdrum club into a world-beating one, will be tarnished. If the entire point of the project was a soft power PR play by the oil-rich nation state, it will have backfired catastrophically.
No matter what happens next, the UAE-owned club will be remembered for cheating on an industrial scale, with a colossal scope, subverting the world’s most popular sporting competition and a British cultural institution for almost a decade.
Los Angeles Clippers and Steve Ballmer
On 2 September the NBA released the findings of an investigation into the Los Angeles Clippers and owner Steve Ballmer. The league found the Clippers and Ballmer were officially caught paying star forward Kawhi Leonard $28m off the books for a no-show job with a supposed sponsor, circumventing the league’s salary cap.
The Clippers were docked five first-round picks and fined $30m. Ballmer, the ninth richest man in the world, was suspended from involvement with his team for a year.
Initially, the Clippers issued a statement snarling 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”. Then, the team accepted the punishment.
The case was exposed after a year-long investigation by journalist Pablo Torre and his podcast, Pablo Torre Finds Out, which won a Pulitzer Prize for its work. The podcast faced deep scepticism, including from Dallas Mavericks minority owner Mark Cuban, who said, “I’m on Team Ballmer. Steve isn’t that dumb.”
Ballmer was only allowed to buy the Clippers when the team’s previous owner, Donald Sterling, was more or less expelled from the league over racist comments; another rare time an owner was brushed back, especially by their own kind.
A new age of accountability?
The first stage of billionaire exposure to accountability is vociferous denial. The second is bafflement that such an earthly and proletarian problem should even be allowed to happen to you, titan of industry, pillar of society, master of man and beast alike. The third is a milquetoast non-apology apology “for the distraction and distress this matter has caused”, after issuing a total and belligerent denial through your proxies.
The twin cases are notable because they represent rare occasions in a modern society which has carved out a friction-free fast lane for the very rich and the very, very rich, that anyone in that stratus should be made to pay a price for anything at all.
Time will probably mark out the Clippers and City cases as outliers. But for now they are notable as people of power and means running into the consequences of their own decadent and crooked decisions, a true novelty in our time.