After all, they were caught bang to rights, 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 unfurled its findings over several episodes and faced deep skepticism, including from Mark Cuban, Dallas Mavericks minority owner and Ballmer’s fellow billionaire. “I’m on Team Ballmer,” Cuban had previously posted in an act of class solidarity. “Steve isn’t that dumb.”
Ballmer, it should be noted, 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 that an owner was brushed back, especially by their own kind.
Then, last week, a similar hammer dropped; Manchester City has been found guilty of more than 100 charges of cheating the Premier League’s financial regulations from 2009 to 2018 and obstructing the subsequent investigation from 2019 to 2023. They’re not at the apology stage yet, insisting on their innocence, as they have all along, taking an aggressively defiant posture.
Still, it seems that in any of the plausible ways this may play out, after several more years of appeals and lawsuits surely, the club’s Abu Dhabi ownership will emerge from the ordeal bruised. Its entire footballing body of work, backed by untold billions in investment turning a humdrum club into a world-beating one, will have been tarnished. And if the entire point of the project – in the club administrator parlance – 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.
It’s worth pausing and taking that in. These are the very 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.
Like that time New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft was allegedly caught paying for sex in a Florida massage parlor; prosecutors dropped the charge. Or the current status of the ridiculous and spiteful New York Knicks owner James Dolan, who faces a lawsuit by a former employee over discrimination in which it’s alleged that he spied on the team’s own fans illegally – this, too, had been reported by Torre. It feels unlikely that Dolan will ever feel any effects from the accusations.
And this is in addition to innumerable examples outside sports – including a certain resident of the White House, and a lot of his friends and allies.
Time will probably mark out the Clippers and City cases as outliers. But that, for now, is what makes them so notable, so newsworthy. People of power and means running into the consequences of their own decadent and crooked decisions. A true novelty in our time.
Clippers owner Steve Ballmer at a game in April. Photograph: Allen Berezovsky/Getty Images
