Executive Meddling / Sports

Most owners of sports teams/leagues aren't athletes themselves, but that doesn't stop them from messing around with things that don't go their way.

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• On October 1, 1961, in the fourth inning of the last game of the season, New York Yankee right fielder Roger Maris hit his 61st home run of the season, breaking Babe Ruth's single-season home run record. The problem was that Baseball Commissioner Ford Frick declared that, because eight games had been added to the baseball season between Ruth setting his record and Maris breaking it, the record would indicate that it took longer for Maris to break it. In addition, Ruth's record would be retained in the books. Frick's reason for doing this was simple: he'd been one of Ruth's best friends, and didn't think an "arrogant little nobody" like Maris was worthy of breaking such a "great man's" record. What makes this worse is that, at least at the time, all baseball records were "officially" kept not by the MLB, AL, or NL offices but by third party publications like Baseball Encyclopedia and The Sporting News, which Frick had no official authority over. Even worse: Maris was finally recognized by MLB as the sole holder of the single season home run record in 1991. Unfortunately, Maris wasn't around to see it as he had died in 1985.^note This story does have a happy ending of sorts, though. Maris' record was of course broken by 3 different players (Mark McGuire broke it in 1998 and finished that season with 70, Barry Bonds set the current record of 73 in 2001, Sammy Sosa only briefly held the record at various points in 1998 and isn't considered an "official" past record holder, but he did hit more than 61 home runs in a season 3 times), however with it being known that all 3 of those players were using steroids, and with enough time passing that the "61*" controversy has largely been forgotten, Maris was considered the true record holder by many hardcore baseball fans until 2022 (well after the steroid era), when Aaron Judge hit 62.
• Ford Frick's appointment to the baseball commissioner's office was essentially a result of executive meddling by the club owners, who by 1950 made it clear they were running the game and the commissioner would be little more than a figurehead under their control. The owners were forced to appoint an authoritarian figure in 1920 in Kenesaw Mountain Landis to help clean up the game's image in the wake of the Black Sox Scandal; when he died in 1945, the owners hoped Albert "Happy" Chandler would be such a figurehead. He was not, as he blocked trades he felt were not in the game's best interests, levied fines against owners and dared allow the color barrier to be broken against many owners' wishes. But when it was discovered he was looking to ban Yankees owner Del Webb and Cardinals owner Fred Saigh for associating with gamblers or other shady activities, Webb struck backroom deals with the other owners to get them to agree to not renew Chandler's contract. Webb was appointed head of the search committee to find Chandler's replacement after suggesting baseball perhaps needed someone with a business and/or legal background - and then selected Frick, a former sportswriter and NL PR chief who had neither.
• In the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games, Brazilian triple jumper João de Oliveira had at least three valid jumps, one of which would break his own world record, annulled by the referees so they could give the gold (and silver) to a Soviet. Some even argue that sponsors Adidas and Mizuno had a hand in it.
• When construction businessman Florentino Pérez was elected as president of Real Madrid in 2000 he was determined to turn the team into the perfect money making machine. Iconic players were sold off and foreign stars brought in, no matter the cost or even if their position was already filled; anyone who had just won an award and was all the rage in the sports press had. to. be. in Real. No exceptions. This in itself wasn't a bad thing: indeed, Real won La Liga and the Champions League twice under his helm between 2000 and 2003. The actual disaster came when Pérez decided to let coach (and lifelong Real man) Vicente del Bosque's contract run out without renewal in 2003 and bring in Manchester United's assistant coach Carlos Queiroz as his replacement. The rumour was that Pérez had done this mainly as a marketing ploy, the Harrison Ford-lookalike Queiroz being more suited in his mind to lead a team with the likes of Beckham, Figo and Zidane than the charmless, quiet, walrus-like del Bosque. Needless to say, Queiroz lacked the experience to lead a team as big as Real Madrid, let alone one with as many egos as Pérez had collected, and the team took an immediate nosedive. Real Madrid were eliminated by Monaco in the Champions League quarter-finals, lost the Copa del Rey to newly-promoted Real Zaragoza, and finished fourth in La Liga after losing all of their last five matches. Real would go then through 8 coaches in six years, and disappointing result after disappointing result, until José Mourinho took the helm in 2010. That same year, the walrus-like del Bosque guided Spain to victory in the World Cup for the first time in the country's history - beating Quieroz' Portugal side along the way.
  
  Then Mourinho was sacked in 2013, and while Real did win the Champions League the following year under Carlo Ancelotti, a second-place La Liga finish in 2014-15 led to Ancelotti getting sacked and rumors immediately spreading that Mourinho would be brought back to replace him. Those rumors rekindled in late 2015 after Mourinho was fired from Chelsea, but didn't come to fruition as he was instead named manager of Manchester United. ^note Mourinho's firing from Real may not have been Florentino's doing; he has been said to have been the one board member that still supported him, and Mourinho's firing was more likely due to him having lost support in the locker room (which seems to be a trend with his clubs after his firing from Chelsea).
  
  And now Pérez seems to be trying to meddle in the affairs of ALL of European soccer as he was more or less the architect behind the "Europe Super League" that would have had 12 of Europe's biggest name clubs competing with each other every year separate from UEFA's rules and in a format similar to how American sports like the NBA operate. Most of the clubs slated to take part in the new competition withdrew their support within 48 hours after it was announced in April 2021 due to mass backlash from fans, media, UEFA and even politicians; as of the end of May, Real Madrid is one of three clubs refusing to officially withdraw and facing harsh penalties from UEFA, with Pérez publicly insisting the Super League is necessary to "save football."
• Owners of football (soccer) clubs are particularly prone to this, usually because they're the men (and they usually are men) with the money. Aside from Pérez, examples include:
  • The owner of Newcastle United, Mike Ashley a.k.a. the most hated man in Newcastle, owner of notoriously penny-pinching business Sports Direct, took over in 2007. The club had been challenging for the prized Champions League places at the very top end of the Premier League, even challenging for the title five years before Ashley took over. While they'd had a bad year the season before he took over, they had still finished 13th, a mid table position and were considered to be a tough team. Two years and several managers later, one of whom, the well-respected Kevin Keegan, complained that the board was not providing sufficient financial support and implied that players were being forced upon him, they were relegated, the ultimate humiliation for a Premier League club. While they bounced back immediately afterwards and did enjoy a 5th-place finish in 2011/12, they ended up nearly being relegated the following season and have spent their time trying to avoid relegation - before biting the bullet again in 2016 - as Ashley sold valuable and influential players, pocketing most of the proceeds and buying up untested players in cut-price deals. While this was sometimes effective in the case of cult hero Fabricio Coloccini and midfielder Yohan Cabaye (the latter of whom was sold on for a notable profit a year or two later), it was usually worse than ineffective. To add insult to injury, Ashley even renamed the iconic St. James' Park "the Sports Direct Arena". However, even the BBC stopped bothering to call it that after about two weeks and everyone still refers to it as St. James' Park. Ashley finally sold the club in 2021, to a consortium led by the Saudi Arabian government, And There Was Much Rejoicing^note while the consortium is itself controversial, due to Saudi Arabia's human rights record and penchant for sportswashing, many fans still prefer them to Ashley, especially since they actually are investing in the club.
  • Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch owner of Chelsea FC, is likewise infamous for this, firing even successful managers if he dislikes the way they play or if they fail to win the trophies that he wants. The only manager who lasted more than two years under his stewardship was José "The Special One" Mourinho, who seemed to broadly enjoy Abramovich's favor.^note Mourinho was fired in December 2015, but reports are that this was more to him having lost respect from the players themselves rather than a falling out with ownership. Following the breakout of the Russo-Ukrainian War in 2022, Abramovich was forced to sell, and American Todd Boehly took over, and his tenure thus far has seen even higher turnover in even shorter intervals than Abramovich's time, going through five coaches in two and a half seasons^note Thomas Tuchel was manager when he first came in and lasted until the start of the next season. He was fired and replaced with Graham Potter after a poor run of form, who was sacked and replaced with Frank Lampard after bad form, with Bruno Saitor taking over in between for a short four days, and now they are currently on Mauricio Pochettino., in addition to knee-jerk massive spending^note They famously spent a full BILLION pounds on players in the span of only two summer windows and a winter window in between to try and kick-start the team's old success only for the signings to underwhelm and fail to live up, creating a negative feedback loop that sees Chelsea flounder in midtable despite the extraordinarily high spending.
  • Vincent Tan, owner of Cardiff City, brought about a number of unpopular changes to the club during Cardiff's maiden Premier League campaign in 2013/14. Cardiff City's traditional colors are blue and white, and their nickname is the Bluebirds. Tan's favorite color is red, and he was attempting to try and develop a market in southeast Asia, a la Manchester United, so he changed the colors to red and changed the crest to feature a large Welsh dragon on it instead of a bluebird. In addition to this, he also knew next to nothing about the game (he once criticized his goalkeeper for not scoring enough goals) and was known to jeer his own players during matches. The fans revolted, and in 2015, Tan was forced to cave to their requests. However, in a surprisingly happy ending, they reached a good compromise, where the crest would return the bluebird to the forefront, the welsh dragon would be on it as well although smaller, and the blue and white home kits returned while red kits would be their new traditional away colors. When all of this happened, the first game back with the new colors saw record-breaking attendance.
  • Shahid Khan and son Tony, owners/investors of Fulham FC (as well as the NFL's Jacksonville Jaguars and All Elite Wrestling). When the Khans bought the club from Mohamed Al Fayed in July 2013, Fulham were coming off a season where they finished 12th in the Premier League - where they had been since 2001 - and had been in the Europa League for two of the previous three seasons. The first full season under Khan ownership, they finished 19th and were relegated. Then they were nearly relegated to the third tier the following season. Since 2018, the club has bounced back and forth between the Premier League and the EFL Championship, never staying in the top flight for more than one season at at a time. There's little doubt many supporters of the club are not satisfied with the management of the club, particularly with Tony as Director of Football, especially given him splitting time between the other sporting groups his dad owns and even calling Fulham a "yo-yo club" where relegation should not be considered that bad.
• David Stern was widely accused of this during his tenure as NBA commissioner. He was accused of rigging the 1985 Draft Lottery to ensure that Patrick Ewing, the top draft pick, went to the New York Knicks. The '90s Chicago Bulls dynasty was widely believed to get favorable calls from the referees in order to ensure success for Michael Jordan. That accusation has spread to later teams, including the early 2000s Los Angeles Lakers and the early 2010s Miami Heat. Concerning the former, the 2002 Western Conference Finals were allegedly rigged by the referees to ensure that the Lakers, who are in a larger media market than their opponents, the Sacramento Kings, went to the NBA Finals. This became apparent afterwards when referee Tim Donaghy was investigated for betting/rigging games, especially with the 2007 Western Conference Semifinals match-up between the Phoenix Suns and San Antonio Spurs also having controversial referee and decision calling. His defense claimed that Game 6 in 2002, which featured twice as many free throws by the Lakers (most in the 4th quarter) in their 4-point win, was rigged. Same for the 2007 Western Conference Semifinals favoring the Spurs over the Suns in that match.
  • Donald Sterling can also be considered that for the Los Angeles Clippers when looking at his ownership problems with the team until his eventual banning in 2014. When he was the owner of the then-San Diego Clippers in 1982, he caused immediate problems with the rest of the NBA, devaluing the team immediately after they already previously lost value in Buffalo back when they were the Braves there a few years prior, to the point of almost being kicked out of his ownership role there. However, David Stern allowed for Sterling to take on a more simplified ownership of the Clippers instead of being forced to sell the team to someone else, with Alan Rothenberg taking over the financial duties there. While the team survived due to the change of hands for financial duties, Sterling still had final says on what he wanted on his mind there, which included a forced move to Los Angeles in 1984 after being encouraged by results of the Oakland Raiders moving to Los Angeles a couple of years earlier. Once he did move the team, Sterling continued being a very frugal owner for the Clippers, firing head coaches constantly while somehow keeping Elgin Baylor as a team executive for 22 straight years (likely for name recognition alone). However, Sterling's sense of entitlement as the team owner ultimately led to his downfall, with a leaked conversation in 2013 being released to the public during the 2014 NBA Playoffs revealing his scumbag racist behavior to the public eye after hints of it was shown in a somewhat public manner many times beforehand. That conversation was what led to Sterling being permanently banned under new commissioner Adam Silver days after the leak, later selling the team to Steve Ballmer of Microsoft fame for two billion dollars.
• NHL commissioner Gary Bettman is booed in every single arena he walks into. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. During his tenure, he has brought about three lockouts, one cancelling the entire season and the others cancelling half, and has continuously defended franchises like the Florida Panthers and the Arizona Coyotes, whose home arenas are eternally empty to the point where the Coyotes were eventually forced to accept a move into the 5,000 seat Mullett Arena in Arizona State University just to survive for the early 2020's, when numerous cities in Canada, and to a lesser extent the Northern U.S. (and even a couple further down in the south), could easily support a hockey team and are really desperate for an NHL franchise (Quebec City is the glaring example for a potential Nordiques revival, but Hamilton, Saskatoon, Houston, Kansas City, and even Seattle before the Kraken arrived are also open markets). This becomes even more puzzling when, after his numerous other cash grabs, he never seemed to notice how moving another such team from Atlanta to hockey-hungry Winnipeg resulted in the franchise receiving a massive revenue increase. Said move also brought about criticism of the administration when Winnipeg were kept in the Southeast Division for two years, with many blaming the Jets missing the playoffs- especially in their first year- on the tiring travel schedule brought about by this. And then when the NHL next expanded, it placed a team in Las Vegas, snubbing Quebec City for that point in time.^note Though this last item is at least defensible in a business sense. The NHL requires that all player salaries be expressed and paid in U.S. dollars. While this means payrolls won't fluctuate with exchange rates, it leaves Canadian teams very vulnerable to said changes, since they collect essentially all of their revenue in Canadian dollars. When the loonie is at or near par with the U.S. dollar, as it was in the early 2010s, it's very good for the Canadian teams' bottom lines. When the loonie loses value against its U.S. counterpart... not so much. When the NHL put Quebec City's latest attempt to rejoin the league on hold, the loonie was trading at about 75 US cents.
• In mixed martial arts, UFC lobbied to end a tax on the purchases of pay-per-views by Oklahoma residents, regardless of where they took place. As a result of their lobbying, Oklahoma decided to ban all combat sports in 2012, including professional wrestling, to shut them up. However, this ended up being an Averted Trope, as the state redrafted the law in question within a month to make it clear that only events held in Oklahoma were subject to that state's tax, which satisfied UFC.
• In 1999, Manchester United won both the FA Cup and Champions League, the latter meaning they qualified for the inaugural World Club Cup, which was being held in Brazil at around the same time as the round of the FA Cup where they would have entered. In an attempt to secure the 2006 FIFA World Cup - for which they were bidding - the FA pressured Manchester United into withdrawing from the FA Cup so they could compete in the Club World Cup without distraction. This backfired big-time, as (a) Germany were awarded the 2006 World Cup and (b) United's withdrawal has been cited as a reason for the decline in interest in the FA Cup.
• An averted example of this - in 2016, NBC requested (though it would later deny that it did so) that the Parade of Nations in the Rio 2016 Opening Ceremony be carried out in English rather than Portuguese, claiming viewing figures would be affected by an early appearance by the United States of America (they would be coming out early due to their name being "Estados Unidos da América" in Portuguese). The IOC refused this request, as it ran contrary to their rules stating that the countries come out according to the host nation's language. (Granted, there have been exceptions to that, due to either the host nation's request^note Japan chose to do their parades in English in 1964 or because of political sensitivities^note Barcelona's parade was in French due to tensions between the Spanish-speaking and Catalan-speaking populations, and Nagano's in 1998 was done in English - had it been in Japanese, China and Chinese Taipei would have come out one after the other, but neither of those applied here.)
• Augusta National Golf Club, an iconic and exclusive club in the US state of Georgia that hosts the Masters Tournament, one of the four major men's golf championships, fell hard into this trope. The course designers—club co-founder and golf legend Bobby Jones, and famed designer Alister MacKenzie—were heavily influenced by the Old Course at St Andrews, the most iconic venue for another major championship, The Open Championship (aka British Open). Jones and MacKenzie intended for the ground game (approaching the green with low-trajectory shots, often running along the ground for considerable distance) to be central to the course design. Unfortunately, the club's other founder, executive director Clifford Roberts, didn't like the ground game, and sought to change the course almost from its opening. The designers resisted, but fate intervened. MacKenzie died a little more than a year after the club opened; a few years later Jones left to serve in World War II, and not long after coming back to Georgia was crippled by a rare spinal cord disorder, giving Roberts a free ride to remake Augusta National in his own image. Unfortunately for the course, Roberts' changes left it extremely vulnerable to advances in golf technology, resulting in countless other changes over the following decades. Nowadays, at least from a golf standpoint, little is left of the original Jones–MacKenzie design except its routing.
• In the British Touring Car Championship's 2016 season, Team BMR wanted to use the Subaru Impreza as their car of choice. Subaru, seeking the marketing opportunity, made them choose the Levorg (an estate car not available in the American market) instead. Surprisingly, this went pretty well: although the car was occasionally a victim of Crippling Overspecialisation (the centre of mass made it excellent on technical circuits, but it struggled on tracks more focused on acceleration), it put Subaru fifth on the decade's manufacturer podium standings in the championship despite ten other manufacturers completing more racing laps, and it was even the car driven by 2017 driver's champion Ashley Sutton.
• The 1972 Olympic Men's Basketball final infamously ended in controversy due to how the last three seconds of game were played three times. One of the causes of the controversy was the intervention of Renato William Jones, then-secretary general of FIBA, who overruled a decision by the referee (even though he had no authority to make rulings about a game in progress) and had the clock reset to three seconds.
• When England took on South Africa for a semifinal in the 1992 Cricket World Cup, the match had frequent rain interruptions during South Africa’s run chase. This caused the duration of the match to slip beyond the 9 PM time limit. This caused Australian TV executives to involve themselves in the match, as the live telecast was eating into prime time programming. Rather than pull a Heidi Bowl and abruptly end the telecast of the match, the executives forced the match officials to somehow end the match early. This resulted in the South Africans’ run target being adjusted from a gettable 13 runs in 8 balls to a difficult but achievable 22 runs in 8 balls to the outrageous 22 runs in 1 ball. After this debacle, the International Cricket Council arm twisted all broadcasters authorized to telecast cricket matches, to never prematurely end a live telecast of a match no matter the delay, and most importantly to never influence the ending of a match ever again.
• The College Football Playoff (and the BCS before it) tends to favor SEC teams (particularly the likes of Alabama, Georgia and Florida and to a lesser extent, LSU and Auburn) over teams from other Power Five conferences with the belief that the SEC draws more money and ratings over other conferences.
• The Lola team attempted to enter Formula One with sponsorship from MasterCard. They expected to get their cars ready for the 1998 season, and so work had to begin in 1996. There is, however, one major problem: MasterCard wants them to debut in 1997 so that Lola can beat Stewart Grand Prix^note Owned by three-time champion Jackie Stewart and is the team that, through two ownership changes, would become the present-day juggernauts Red Bull Racing, who is scheduled to made their debut that year. This resulted in Lola having to rush the cars so that it's ready for the 1997 season and it shows. The largely untested, ineffective Lola T97/30 had no hope of reaching the 107% qualifying cutoff. The constructor folded right after their first entry (and it contributed to Lola's eventual bankruptcy many years later) while MasterCard got off the fiasco scot-free.