2026 has seen an unusual jump in financial rule-breaking among some of the world’s most profitable sports franchises and leagues. Within months this past summer, both the Los Angeles Clippers and Lakers, as well as the English Premier League’s Manchester City, were accused or found guilty of various financial breaches of their respective league rules.
These franchises violated financial rules differently; the Clippers and Manchester City did so over several years, while Mark Walter, former owner of the Lakers, faces a criminal investigation for insurance fraud. On Sept. 2, the NBA charged the Los Angeles Clippers with circumventing the league’s salary cap to pay their best player, Kawhi Leonard, under the table. As a result, the Clippers lost five first-round draft picks, were fined $30 million and owner Steve Ballmer was suspended from all team activities for one year. Gillian Zucker, the team’s president of business operations, was suspended without pay for one year, while Lawrence Frank, their president of basketball operations, received a six-month unpaid suspension. Leonard was fined only $700k, though he is estimated to have profited over $65 million from his under-the-table deals. Leonard was given no-show endorsement jobs facilitated by the team in a way that violated NBA rules.
The Lakers’ previous owner, while not violating NBA salary rules, faces criminal and civil investigations for insurance fraud. Walter sold his controlling stake in the Lakers to Josh Kushner and Bob Iger at a franchise valuation of $12.5 billion, less than a year after acquiring control at a $10 billion valuation. Walter is CEO of Guggenheim Partners and co-CEO and chairman of TWG Global, which operates in financial services, energy, sports, media and more and has a net worth of over $6 billion. The civil suit accuses Walter of misleading policyholders at his insurance companies, taking their payments and putting them into a slush fund allegedly used to buy majority stakes in both the Los Angeles Dodgers and Lakers. The suit also accuses him of withholding from policyholders the fact that these insurance companies were under federal investigation. The suit claims that Walter’s insurance firms reported only 3% of their assets were tied up in companies associated with Walter, but they were actually investing up to 42% of their assets in affiliated companies without disclosure. Though unconfirmed, this has led to speculation that Walter sold his controlling interest in the Lakers to liquidate some assets and fight the suit.
All this brings us across the pond to Manchester City. An independent commission found City guilty on 114 of the 115 charges the English Premier League levied on Sept. 29. The charges accuse the club of “sham contracts” with its commercial sponsors involving its Abu Dhabi owners, which artificially inflated the team’s revenue and kept down costs by over £900 million. Their punishment is yet to be determined but could range from league relegation and expulsion to fines, points deductions and transfer bans that would prohibit the team from signing new players.
Such widespread financial manipulation speaks to our moment quite well. This trend suggests that the billionaire owners of these teams believe they can buy their way around the rules. That life outside sports seems to be approaching plutocracy has made all of us especially aware of those who try to manipulate the rules of our institutions with seemingly infinite capital. The severity of the punishments, however, gives me hope that sports around the world will not fall into a plutocracy. Whether or not the punishments were severe because the leagues are cynically trying to virtue signal to the fans is irrelevant to me. Even if the leagues are pretending to be outraged on our behalf, I’d rather that than tacitly allow financial doping to continue because it makes the leagues more money too. Manchester City’s punishment is still undecided, as the club has appealed, but given that they were definitively found guilty of serious charges, I hope the punishment is proportionally severe. City’s eventual punishment may be a slap on the wrist, but given the publicity around the charges and the backdrop of other financial irregularities in American sports, one can only hope it’s severe enough to firmly curb a sports plutocracy.
