Sports leagues write rules. Enforcing them is the harder part.
Players, teams and executives throughout history have looked for ways to work around their respective sports’ rules to better position themselves to win. Teams have hidden bonus payments in international signings, deflated footballs, hacked a rival’s scouting database, and, in one century-old case, conspired with gamblers to fix a World Series. Governing bodies have answered with lifetime bans, forced sales, vacated wins, relegation and expulsion from international play.
Here, we’ve ranked the biggest punishments in sports history. The ranking weighs more than the size of a fine. It accounts for what each penalty took away: draft capital, titles, whole seasons, jobs and access to competition itself. (Note: Punishments only involving either owners or general managers, such as former Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling and Phoenix Suns owner Robert Sarver, were excluded from consideration.)
The list spans more than a century, from the 1919 “Black Sox” to the Los Angeles Clippers’ salary-cap circumvention with Kawhi Leonard.