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.

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.

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)