Culture
A history of spying in football: Drones, interns at training and kit men in ceilings
Are not even the Olympic Games sacrosanct?
Yeah, you’re right. Probably not, given their long history of judging corruption, state boycotts and widespread doping.
But the news which broke on Tuesday, three days before the opening ceremony and hours before the first action in the 2024 Games’ football tournament, meant that the cherished Olympic values of fair play stood in tatters even before organisers emblazoned that message across the Parisien sky and the River Seine.
That it was Canada who performed such an egregious breach of the rules — by all stereotypes a country known for its people being polite, respectful, laidback and just terribly nice — only adds to the ironic drama.
There are five rings in the Olympic logo — take just two of them intertwined, and they resemble a pair of binoculars.
So this is what happened…
On Tuesday, at a training session ahead of their opening match of the group stage in Saint-Etienne on Thursday, staff members from the New Zealand women’s football team noticed a drone hovering above them.
Bev Priestman, the Canada coach, watching her team in action earlier this year (Jason Mowry/Getty Images)
They called the on-site police, who detained the device’s operator, who was later revealed to be a staff member from the Canadian team, the reigning Olympic women’s champions, and their opponents in that opener today.
In an initial statement, the Canadian Olympic Committee (COC) apologised — but more was to come.
The following day, it became clear that there had been two drone incidents, with the other taking place five days earlier, on July 19. Now facing severe sanctions, the COC needed to act.
Joseph Lombardi, an “unaccredited analyst”, and Jasmine Mander, a member of the coaching staff who oversees Lombardi, have been removed from the team and sent home and Canada’s English head coach Beverly Priestman has voluntarily stepped down from being on the touchline for the New Zealand game.
“On behalf of our entire team, I first and foremost want to apologize to the players and staff at New Zealand Football and to the players on Team Canada,” Priestman said. “This does not represent the values that our team stand for.”
That final sentence is a little difficult to justify, given that spying on another team’s training is hardly an accidental action — nobody finds themselves flying a $2,000 piece of tech over their next opponents — twice — by mistake. Rather, it comes as a product of culture and command.
“I am ultimately responsible for conduct in our program,” Priestman added. “Accordingly, to emphasize our team’s commitment to integrity, I have decided to voluntarily withdraw from coaching the match on Thursday. In the spirit of accountability, I do this with the interests of both teams in mind and to ensure everyone feels that the sportsmanship of this game is upheld.”
This may be new to the Olympics — but spying in football is old business.
Teams sending scouts to watch the next side they are going to play at training probably predates the invention of the offside rule. In fairness, though, we do not know if ancient Olympian Theagenes of Thasos sent emissaries to watch Arrichion of Phigalia working on his moves.
Didier Deschamps, the France head coach, spotted a drone over training at the 2014 World Cup (Martin Rose/Getty Images)
In international football, France men’s manager Didier Deschamps noticed a drone above his players as they trained at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil — it was never discovered which, if any, of their group-stage rivals Ecuador, Honduras and Switzerland it belonged to.
Go back two more decades and ahead of a vital away World Cup qualifier against Norway in 1993, England manager Graham Taylor was so convinced his team were being watched that he moved their training base to a military facility. The issue? That new location was near the house of the chief sportswriter of one of Norway’s leading newspapers, who subsequently published their tactics the next morning. England lost, 2-0, in Oslo, ended up missing out on the 1994 World Cup, and Taylor got sacked.
Similarly, in a case of paranoia outweighing perspective, the Chilean football federation once sent up their own device to destroy a drone hovering over their session before a match against Argentina. It was perhaps football’s first case of aerial warfare since Roy Keane’s infamous tackle on Alfie Haaland. In this case, it turned out the questionable drone was a surveying tool being used by a Chilean telecommunications company.
But there is one example of spying which did emanate from South America — when, in early 2019, Leeds United’s Argentine head coach Marcelo Bielsa admitted sending an intern to watch the following weekend’s opponents Derby County work on their formation, set pieces and so on. It was not the first time.
“We watched training sessions of all the opponents before we played them,” Bielsa, now Uruguay’s head coach said. In Argentina, this practice was common apparently, and one he had continued after coming to work in Europe.
Officers have just attended the Training Ground for @dcfcofficial After a suspicious male was seen at the perimeter fence. Excellent searching conducted & male was located. All checks above board!
Keeping the team safe to bring home a win against #LUFC on 11th! #SpyingIsCheating pic.twitter.com/a12Zj8gISX— Derby Response – This account is closing (@DerbyResponse) January 10, 2019
Derby and Frank Lampard, their manager at the time, were furious. When Bielsa rang the former Chelsea and England midfielder to explain himself, there was no apology — but instead, in broken English, he attempted to remove any ambiguity around the circumstances.
Leeds won the ensuing match, 2-0 — and the following week, Bielsa held an unprecedented press conference for local journalists, 66 minutes long, in which he used a PowerPoint presentation to demonstrate the full extent of the analysis he carried out on opposition clubs.
For Bielsa, who held open training sessions throughout his time at Athletic Bilbao in Spain, watching teams going through their tactical preparations like this was not spying, but simply gathering information.
Leeds’ Bielsa, centre, admitted spying on Lampard, right, and Derby (Alex Dodd – CameraSport via Getty Images)
It was later pointed out by Leeds fans that, as a player, Lampard has been part of a Chelsea side which profited from similar, um, info-gathering missions.
In an interview with UK newspaper the Telegraph, former Chelsea manager Andre Villas-Boas admitted that, in his time as an assistant at the London club under Jose Mourinho, he would “travel to training grounds, often incognito, and look at our opponents’ mental and physical state before drawing my conclusions”. Chelsea won the Premier League title twice with Mourinho and Villas-Boas in situ.
Given the amount of information that rival clubs can draw on, some coaches are simply not too bothered by allegations of spying. In 2018, German Bundesliga side Werder Bremen used a drone to spy on Hoffenheim — but Hoffenheim’s coach Julian Nagelsmann, now manager of Germany’s national team, brushed off its impact.
“I’m not really angry at the analyst doing his job,” Nagelsmann said, before adding it was “commendable” that Bremen were going to such lengths to try to win.
Similarly, in the aftermath of the Leeds incident, former striker Gary Taylor-Fletcher recalled an incident from his Lincoln City side’s 2003-04 League Two play-off semi-final second leg away to Huddersfield Town.
While the Lincoln players were receiving their half-time team talk, Taylor-Fletcher tweeted, a polystyrene ceiling tile broke and then fell down — revealing the sizable heft of longtime Huddersfield kit man Andy Brook listening from the cavity above. Lincoln went on to lose the tie, while their opponents lost their dignity — but did end up getting promoted. And Taylor-Fletcher can’t have been too annoyed because, a year later, he left Lincoln for… Huddersfield.
Football is not alone in this sort of espionage — and other sports can be much more high-tech.
The McLaren Formula 1 team were given the largest fine in sporting history — $100million — and thrown out of the sport’s 2007 Constructors’ Championship after senior engineer Mike Coughlan received technical design documents which had been leaked from rivals Ferrari.
There have also been several high-profile incidents in American football.
Also in 2007, the New England Patriots, the most successful NFL team of recent years with six Super Bowl wins since the turn of the century, were punished for recording the defensive signals given to players during a game by coaches of the New York Jets. New England’s legendary head coach Bill Belichick was fined $500,000 — the maximum allowed by the league, and the most in NFL history — while the team were denied their first-round pick in the following year’s player draft.
Belichick in 2007, when his team were caught recording the New York Jets’ defensive signals (AP Photo/Mel Evans, File)
Does cheating prosper? Well, New England won all 16 games in the 2007 regular season — but were surprisingly beaten in the Super Bowl by the New York Giants.
And it’s not just the professionals in the gridiron game. Last October, the University of Michigan’s head coach Jim Harbaugh was suspended over a similar sign-stealing scandal which quickly escalated to involve allegations also levelled at several other college teams. Harbaugh was banned for several games, but Michigan went on to win the U.S. college national championship on his return. Harbaugh has since moved on to become head coach of the NFL’s Los Angeles Chargers.
So this is the bottom line: teams cheat.
In a multimillion (or even billion) dollar/pound/euro industry, marginal gains like those detailed here are worth the risk of detection. For every Canada, Leeds and Michigan caught, there are clubs and sides whose operatives get away with it.
Widespread but not necessarily endemic, it is both serious and not serious, funny and infuriating, the natural by-product of a game being taken as lifeblood.
Back in the ancient Olympics, contemporary accounts reveal athletes being bribed to say they were from certain city-states rather than others — facing a potential punishment of public flogging if they were caught.
Things have not really changed — and the punishment, at least to the guilty party’s public reputation, is not so different either.
Teams are willing to run that risk.
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)
Now that we’ve memorized the first half of our poem, let’s learn a little more about the man who wrote it. (Haven’t memorized anything yet? Click here to start at the beginning.)
For most of his life, Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) was a star. He was widely read, quoted, argued over and gossiped about, achieving a level of fame that few writers now — and not many then — could contemplate. His New York Times obituary did not hesitate to call him “the foremost poet of his generation.”
Celebrity of that kind is ephemeral, but Auden’s words have continued to circulate in the half century since his death. Maybe you’ve heard some of them before. In the 1994 film “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” his poem “Funeral Blues” is recited by Matthew (John Hannah) over the casket of his lover, Gareth (Simon Callow).
In the Gen-X touchstone “Before Sunrise” (1995), Jesse (Ethan Hawke) regales Celine (Julie Delpy) with an impression of Dylan Thomas reading Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening.”
In both these scenes, the characters use Auden’s poetry to give voice to a longing for which they otherwise might not have words. Auden’s poetry is often useful in that way. It speaks to recognizable human occasions, and it isn’t always all about him.
“The More Loving One” might not be something you’d quote at a funeral or on a date, but it is almost effortlessly quotable — the perfect expression of a thought you never knew you had:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Ken Burns, filmmaker
The word “I” occurs five times in this stanza, but we don’t know much about the person speaking. His personality is camouflaged and revealed by craft.
Auden, born in the northern English cathedral city of York, began practicing that craft as a schoolboy, and honed it at Oxford. Not long after graduating in 1928, he was anointed by critics and readers as the great hope of modern English poetry. A charismatic, divisive figure, he gathered acolytes, imitators and haters.
He swam in the intellectual and ideological crosscurrents of the 1930s, drawing Marxism, psychoanalysis and mystical nationalism into his writing. Assimilating a daunting array of literary influences — Old English and Ancient Greek, French chansons and Icelandic sagas — he forged a poetic personality that was bold, confiding and seductive.
His love poems of that era were candid, discreet dispatches from a calendar of feverish entanglements, wrenching breakups and one-night stands, usually with other men. He also wrote about the feverish politics of the time — class conflict; the rise of fascism; the Spanish Civil War — in ringing rhetoric he later disavowed.
In 1939 Auden moved to America, acquiring U.S. citizenship after World War II. In New York he fell in love with Chester Kallman, a young American writer who became his life partner.
It was a complicated relationship, starting as a passionate affair and enduring through decades of domestic companionship and creative collaboration. Kallman’s refusal to be sexually exclusive wounded Auden, a dynamic that poignantly shades this poem’s most memorable couplet:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Yiyun Li, writer
In America, Auden distanced himself from the radical politics of his earlier career and embraced Anglican Christianity. His intellectual preoccupations shifted toward religion and existentialism — to the kinds of big questions we think about late at night, or when we look to the sky.
Making the leap from wunderkind to grand old man without seeming to stop in middle age, he became a mentor for several generations of younger poets. He was a prolific and punctual contributor of reviews and essays to various publications, including this one, for which he wrote a rave of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring” in 1954.
Through it all, Auden devoted fanatical attention to the finer points of poetic technique. His notebooks are full of numbers, word lists and markings that show just how deep this commitment went. He counted every syllable, measured every stress.
He gathered rhymes and other words with a lexicographer’s zeal and a crossword puzzler’s precision.
The third stanza of “The More Loving One” is a miniature showcase of Auden’s skill. Of the four epigrams arrayed before us, it may be the most technically perfect.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
W.H. Auden, poet
The rhythm is flawless, without an extra syllable or an accent out of place. The grammar is also fastidious. Here is a single sentence, springloaded with equivocation, beginning with one idea and sliding toward its opposite.
This quatrain is the poem’s ideal formal representation of itself, a kind of proof of concept: four lines of impeccable iambic tetrameter in an AABB rhyme scheme. The by-the-book regularity of this stanza should give you a leg up in memorizing it, and you can test yourself below!
But the rest of the poem is an argument against perfection, just as it is a celebration of uncertainty and humility — as we’ll see tomorrow.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Your first task: Learn the first two lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
PERMANENCE, by Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh’s novels are always speculative in some way, with either the author or her characters forging a world governed by its own logic and rules. In their boldness and their ability to convey the violence of patriarchy, they recall the work of Jacqueline Harpman — not only the cherished “I Who Have Never Known Men,” but also “Orlanda,” her wild riff on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”
Like Harpman, Mackintosh has a spare and confident hand. Her work is sometimes described as dreamlike; certainly, its contours are sketched with rapidity and confidence and relatively little detail. Her prose operates according to the same principle, at once lyrical and precise, like this from her second novel, “Blue Ticket”: “On the ground was a dead rabbit, disemboweled. Still fresh, the dark loops of its insides glistening like jam.”
When Mackintosh writes about masculine power, she does so in a way that articulates both its seductions and its terrors. Her newest novel, “Permanence,” is less explicitly concerned with the structure of patriarchy, but it has the same erotic charge as her earlier work, the same preoccupation with social prohibitions and the thrill that comes from breaking them.
Like “Blue Ticket,” “Permanence” turns on a highly pronounced binary. In “Blue Ticket,” adolescent girls are issued either a blue or white ticket on the day of their first period. A white ticket denotes a future of marriage and children, a blue ticket one of work — even, it seems, a career. The divide is stark and self-evidently faulty, its coarseness an expression of the brutalizing regime the characters are trapped in.
“Permanence” features a similar opposition, neatly delineated. Clara and Francis are conducting an illicit affair. One morning, they wake up in an alternate reality where they are openly living together. The novel shuttles between these two worlds, one ordinary and familiar, the other a curdled paradise for adulterers.
The thinness of this “city of impermanence” — “fluid, cohesive and yet disparate” — emerges at once. The sky is “uncannily blue,” the newspaper bears no date, the edge of the city is marked by “a slick ring of water, as far as the eye could see.”
Still, a boundary cannot keep the other world from seeping in. Initially, elegantly, this is a problem in the structure of desire. Having been provided the life they dreamed of, in which their longing for each other is fully met, Clara and Francis begin to experience, to their uneasy surprise, boredom and discontent.
Without absence, the intensity of their desire for each other wanes. They even begin, or at least Francis does, to long for the relief of their ordinary life: “Another day ahead of them of petting, giggling, lying around. It seemed insubstantial suddenly, though only the day before he had felt he could do it forever.”
Soon enough, it becomes clear that the problem between Francis and Clara doesn’t lie in the outside impediments of the world they live in, but in their relationship itself. Francis remains troublingly himself — a married father of a small child, reluctant to leave his family, however much he is in love with Clara: “He did love her, and he did want to be with her. … But he already had reality elsewhere, reality which he sometimes felt trapped by, he would admit, but which he could not truly imagine cutting loose.”
“Permanence” might seem like an outlier in the current array of articles and books about open marriages and polyamory, and at first glance the line of distinction between the two worlds, much like the division between blue and white tickets, seems almost old-fashioned. But as Mackintosh persuasively illustrates, the familiar emotions of jealousy, infatuation and eventually indifference — these persist and can flourish in any relationship, however free of prohibition.
“You want this,” Clara tells herself, and then, “You no longer want this,” as it occurs to her that “maybe it was in absence that they loved each other best, and most honestly.”
In her work, Mackintosh devises scenarios that are bold and almost aggressively simplified. But her terrain is complexity and contradiction, and in her hands these oppositions twist and turn in on themselves.
It’s hardly a surprise when the central character in “Blue Ticket” decides to eschew her designation and have a child, declaring, “True and false were no longer opposing binaries. My body was speaking to me in a language I had not heard before.” Nor is it especially startling when discontent chases Clara and Francis from one world to the other, unraveling their relationship.
What is more disquieting is the surreptitious ease with which Mackintosh’s speculative worlds start to align with our own, allowing the reader to see how so many of the old prohibitions and conventions — around choice, around marriage — remain, somehow, firmly in place.
That moment of recognition, in a landscape that is startlingly alien, is the source of Mackintosh’s power as a writer.
PERMANENCE | By Sophie Mackintosh | Avid Reader Press | 240 pp. | $28
Maybe you woke up this morning haunted by the first four lines of W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — or tickled by its tongue-in-cheek handling of existential dread. (Not ringing any bells? Click here to begin the Poetry Challenge).
This is a love poem. Perhaps that seems like an obvious thing to say about a poem with “Loving” in its title, but there isn’t much romance in the opening stanza.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Ada Limón, poet
Nonetheless, the poem soon makes clear that love is very much on its mind.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
David Sedaris, writer
The polished informality gives the impression of a decidedly cerebral speaker — someone who’s looking at love philosophically, thinking about how it works and what it means.
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Musing this way — arguing in this fashion — he stands in a long line of playful, thoughtful poetic lovers going back at least to the 16th century. He sounds a bit like Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd:
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
Auden’s poem, like Marlowe’s, is written in four-beat lines:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Josh Radnor, actor
And it features strong end rhymes:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Samantha Harvey, writer
These tetrameter couplets represent a long-established poetic love language. Not too serious or sappy, but with room for both earnestness and whimsy. And even for professions of the opposite of love, as in this nursery rhyme, adapted from a 17th-century epigram:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know and know full well
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
There is some of this anti-love spirit in Auden’s poem too, but it mainly follows a general rule of love poetry: The person speaking is usually the more loving one.
This makes sense. To write a poem requires effort, art, inspiration. To speak in verse is to tease, to cajole, to seduce, all actions that suggest an excess of desire. That’s why it’s conventional to refer to the “I” in a poem like this as the Lover and the “you” as the Beloved. The line “Let the more loving one be me” could summarize a lot of the love poetry of the last few thousand years.
But who, in this case, is the beloved? This isn’t a poem to the stars, but about them. Or maybe a poem that uses the stars as a conceit and our complicated feelings about them as a screen for other difficult emotions.
What the stars have to do with love is a tricky question. The answer may just be that the poem assumes a relationship and then plays with the implications of its assumption.
This kind of play also has a long history. Since love is both abstract and susceptible to cliché, poets are eager to liken it to everything else under the sun: birds, bees, planets, stars, the movement of the tides and the cycle of the seasons. Andrew Marvell’s “Definition of Love,” from the 1600s, wraps its ardor in math:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
The literary term for this is wit. The formidable 18th-century English wordsmith Samuel Johnson defined a type of wit as “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” he wrote; that kind of conceptual discord defines “The More Loving One.”
The second stanza is, when you think about it, a perfect non sequitur. A hypothetical, general question is asked:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Mary Roach, writer
The answer is a personal declaration that is moving because it doesn’t seem to apply only or primarily to stars:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tim Egan, writer
Does this disjunction make it easier or harder to remember? Either way, these couplets start to reveal just how curious this poem is. We might find ourselves curious about who wrote them, and whom he might have loved. Tomorrow we’ll get to know Auden and his work a little better.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the second stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
-
Augusta, GA3 minutes agoAttention, shoppers: Augusta-area Walmarts to be remodeled in 2026
-
Washington, D.C9 minutes ago11 hurt after work vehicle collides with Silver Line train at Metro Center
-
Cleveland, OH15 minutes agoHouston Astros at Cleveland Guardians prediction, pick for Tuesday 4/21/26
-
Austin, TX21 minutes agoAppeals court rules Texas can require public schools to display Ten Commandments in class
-
Alabama27 minutes agoAlabama Defeated By Birmingham
-
Alaska33 minutes agoHawaiian, Alaska reservation systems merge: Big changes for travelers start April 22
-
Arizona39 minutes agoMichigan defenseman Hunter Hady transfers to Arizona State
-
Arkansas45 minutes ago
#24 Arkansas Explodes for Eight Runs in Eighth to Race past Missouri State in Midweek Rematch
