Man City Found Guilty of 100+ Cheating Charges, Clippers Caught Paying Kawhi $28M Off the Books — Rich People Are Having a Month

Let's Start With the Clippers, Because It Is Genuinely Insane

The NBA released its findings on September 2nd. The Los Angeles Clippers, owned by Steve Ballmer, the ninth richest man in the world, had paid star forward Kawhi Leonard $28 million off the books through a supposed sponsorship arrangement. A no-show job. Twenty-eight million dollars, hidden, to circumvent the league's salary cap. The punishment, as The Guardian reports: five first-round draft picks stripped, a $30 million fine, and Ballmer suspended from involvement with his own team for a full year.

The Clippers' first move, naturally, was denial. The team issued a statement saying it "vehemently rejected" the NBA's findings, which it called the result of "a heavily biased investigation seeking to justify a predetermined narrative rather than facts and evidence." This is the second stage of billionaire accountability, as The Guardian's Leander Schaerlaeckens describes it so precisely: bafflement that this earthly, proletarian problem is being allowed to happen to you.

Then they accepted the punishment. Because they were, as the Guardian puts it, "caught bang to rights." The investigation wasn't even the NBA's originally. It was journalist Pablo Torre and his podcast, Pablo Torre Finds Out, which spent a year unraveling the scheme and won a Pulitzer Prize for it. Mark Cuban, fellow billionaire and Dallas Mavericks minority owner, had posted "I'm on Team Ballmer" in what The Guardian accurately calls "an act of class solidarity." Steve, Mark said, isn't that dumb.

Steve was that dumb.

Then Manchester City Brought the Industrial-Scale Version

If the Clippers case was a financial crime thriller, Manchester City's is a ten-season prestige drama. The Premier League found Man City guilty of more than 100 charges of cheating financial regulations, covering conduct from 2009 to 2018, plus obstruction of the investigation from 2019 to 2023. That is not a rounding error. That is not a technicality. That is a decade-long, systematic, deliberate subversion of the rules governing the most-watched sporting competition on the planet.

The club is still at the defiant denial stage, according to The Guardian, insisting on its innocence with the kind of aggressive posture you adopt when the alternative is admitting you ran the longest con in English football history. But the math is already ugly regardless of appeals. The Abu Dhabi ownership poured untold billions into transforming a mid-table English club into a global footballing empire. The entire point, as The Guardian notes, was a soft power public relations exercise for an oil-rich nation state. Whatever happens in the appeals process, that exercise has now backfired catastrophically.

No trophy, no title, no Champions League night is going to be remembered cleanly now. The whole project is tainted. And that is before anyone gets to the punishment phase, which still has years of litigation ahead of it.

The Denial Playbook Is Identical, and That's the Point

What connects these two cases beyond the cheating itself is the choreography afterward. The Guardian maps it out in four stages: vociferous denial, bafflement that consequences could apply to someone of your stature, a milquetoast non-apology for "the distraction and distress," and then whatever comes next. The Clippers got through stage three. Manchester City is still planted firmly in stage one.

This playbook exists because it usually works. You deny loudly. You throw lawyers at the problem. You call the investigators biased. You wait. Most of the time, the charge fades, the story moves on, and you are fine. Robert Kraft, the New England Patriots owner, was allegedly caught paying for sex at a Florida massage parlor. Prosecutors dropped the charge. James Dolan, who owns the New York Knicks and is by most accounts a genuinely unpleasant human being, reportedly spied on his own fans and faces a discrimination lawsuit from a former employee. The Guardian notes it "feels unlikely that Dolan will ever feel any effects" from any of it. Pablo Torre reported on that one too, by the way.

Why These Cases Are Outliers, Not a Trend

Here is the thing that keeps this story from being a feel-good accountability moment: these cases are aberrations. The Guardian is clear on that. The systems that normally protect very wealthy people from the consequences of their decisions did not fully kick in here, but they tried. The Clippers issued their denial. City hired their lawyers. Both counted on the investigations being inconclusive, or the coverage being skeptical, or the institutions being too cowardly to act.

What broke the pattern in the Clippers' case was a reporter with a podcast and enough tenacity to keep pulling on the thread for a year until it unraveled completely. What broke it in City's case was a Premier League process that, despite facing years of legal pressure and club resistance, eventually reached a verdict. These are not signs that the system has been fixed. They are signs that occasionally, in very specific circumstances, with extraordinary reporting and institutional backbone, consequences sneak through the cracks.

Schaerlaeckens calls this a "strange new age" and then immediately qualifies it: strictly limited to the confines of sports, where nothing actually matters. He's right. Outside the white lines, the billionaire class is having a very different autumn.