A history of football espionage: drones, trainees in training and kit men in ceilings

Aren’t even the Olympic Games sacred?

Yes, you are 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 just hours before the first action in the 2024 football tournament, meant that the cherished Olympic values ​​of fair play were already in tatters before organisers had even painted that message across the Parisian sky and the River Seine.

That it was Canada who committed such a gross violation of the rules — a country known, by all stereotypes, for its polite, respectful, laid-back and just plain nice people — only adds to the ironic drama.

There are five rings in the Olympic logo. If you intertwine two of them, they look like a pair of binoculars.

So this is what happened…

On Tuesday, during a training session ahead of the opening group stage match in Saint-Etienne, staff from the New Zealand women’s football team spotted a drone hovering above them.

Canada coach Bev Priestman watches her team in action earlier this year (Jason Mowry/Getty Images)

They called the police on the scene, who arrested the driver of the device, who later turned out to be an employee of the Canadian team, the reigning women’s Olympic champions, and their opponents in today’s opening match.

In an initial statement, the Canadian Olympic Committee (COC) apologized, but more was to follow.

The next day it became clear that two drone incidents had taken place, with the other one occurring five days earlier on July 19. With the COC facing heavy sanctions, action had to be taken.

Joseph Lombardi, an “unaccredited analyst”, and Jasmine Mander, a member of the coaching staff who supervises Lombardi, have been removed from the team and sent home, and England’s Canada coach Beverly Priestman has voluntarily stepped down from the sidelines for the match against New Zealand.

“On behalf of our entire team, I would like to first apologize to the players and staff of New Zealand Football and to the players of Team Canada,” Priestman said. “This does not represent the values ​​that our team stands for.”

That last sentence is a bit tricky to justify, since spying on another team’s training is hardly an unintentional act — no one catches themselves accidentally flying a $2,000 piece of technology over their next opponents — twice — but only by accident. Rather, it’s a product of culture and command.

“I am ultimately responsible for the conduct of our program,” Priestman added. “As such, I have decided to voluntarily step aside from coaching Thursday’s game to underscore our team’s commitment to integrity. In the spirit of accountability, I do so with the best interests of both teams in mind and to ensure that everyone feels that the sportsmanship of this game is being upheld.”

This may be new to the Olympics, but espionage in football is an old profession.

Teams sending scouts to watch the next match they are training against probably predates the invention of the offside rule. In fairness, we do not know whether the ancient Olympian Theagenes of Thasos sent emissaries to watch Arrichion of Phigalia work on his moves.

France coach Didier Deschamps spotted a drone above training at the 2014 World Cup (Martin Rose/Getty Images)

In international football, France coach Didier Deschamps saw a drone flying over his players as they trained at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. It was never clear which of their group stage rivals Ecuador, Honduras and Switzerland the drone belonged to.

Go back another two decades and before a crucial away World Cup match against Norway in 1993, England manager Graham Taylor was so convinced his team were being watched that he moved their training camp to a military complex. The problem? The new location was near the home of the chief sports writer of one of Norway’s major newspapers, who then published their tactics the next morning. England lost 2-0 in Oslo, ultimately missing out on the 1994 World Cup, and Taylor was sacked.

Similarly, in a case of paranoia that trumps perspective, the Chilean Football Federation once sent out their own device to destroy a drone hovering over their session before a match against Argentina. It was perhaps the first instance of aerial warfare in football since Roy Keane’s infamous tackle on Alfie Haaland. In this case, the questionable drone turned out to be a measuring device used by a Chilean telecommunications company.

But there is one example of espionage that did come from South America: in early 2019, Leeds United’s Argentinian head coach Marcelo Bielsa admitted that he had sent a trainee to watch opponents Derby County work on their formation, set-pieces and the like the following weekend. It wasn’t the first time.

“We watched all the opponents’ training sessions before we played them,” said Bielsa, now Uruguay’s coach. In Argentina, it was apparently a common practice, and one he continued to use after he went to work in Europe.

Officers have just visited the training field for @dcfcofficial After a suspicious man was seen at the fence. Excellent investigation done and man found. All checks above board!
Keeping the team safe to take home a win against #LUFC on the 11th! #SpyingIsCheating photo.twitter.com/a12Zj8gISX

— Derby Response – This account is being closed (@DerbyResponse) January 10, 2019

Derby and Frank Lampard, their manager at the time, were furious. When Bielsa called the former Chelsea and England midfielder to explain himself, there was no apology — instead he tried to clear up any ambiguity about the circumstances in broken English.

Leeds won the next match 2–0, and the following week Bielsa held an unprecedented 66-minute press conference for local journalists in which he used a PowerPoint presentation to outline the full extent of the analysis he was carrying out on the opposition clubs.

For Bielsa, who ran open training sessions during his time at Athletic Bilbao in Spain, it has not been easy to see teams carrying out their tactical preparations in this way. espionagebut just collecting information.

Leeds’ Bielsa, centre, admitted spying on Lampard, right, and Derby (Alex Dodd – CameraSport via Getty Images)

Leeds fans later pointed out that as a player, Lampard was part of a Chelsea team that benefited from similar, er, intelligence-gathering missions.

In an interview with British newspaper The Telegraph, former Chelsea manager Andre Villas-Boas admitted that during his time as assistant at the London club under Jose Mourinho, he “often travelled incognito to training grounds and looked at the mental and physical state of our opponents before drawing conclusions”. Chelsea won the Premier League title twice with Mourinho and Villas-Boas on the ground.

Given the amount of information rival clubs can draw on, some coaches simply aren’t that irritated by accusations of spying. In 2018, German Bundesliga club Werder Bremen used a drone to spy on Hoffenheim — but Hoffenheim coach Julian Nagelsmann, now manager of the German national team, dismissed the impact.

“I’m not really angry with the analyst doing his job,” Nagelsmann said, before adding that it was “commendable” that Bremen made such an effort to try to win.

Similarly, after the Leeds incident, former striker Gary Taylor-Fletcher recalled an incident that occurred during the second leg of his team’s League Two play-off semi-final at Lincoln City in the 2003–04 season, away to Huddersfield Town.

As Lincoln’s players were receiving their half-time team speech, Taylor-Fletcher tweeted that a polystyrene ceiling tile had cracked and fallen, revealing the considerable weight of long-standing Huddersfield kitman Andy Brook, who was listening from the void above. Lincoln lost the game, while their opponents lost their dignity, but they were eventually promoted. And Taylor-Fletcher can’t have been too annoyed, as he left Lincoln for… Huddersfield a year later.

Football is not the only country where this kind of espionage takes place. Other sports can be much more sophisticated.

Formula One team McLaren was fined the largest amount in sporting history: $100 million. The team was also expelled from the 2007 Constructors’ Championship after senior engineer Mike Coughlan obtained technical design documents leaked from rival Ferrari.

There have also been several notable incidents in American football.

Also in 2007, the New England Patriots, the NFL’s most successful team in recent years with six Super Bowl wins since the turn of the century, were penalized for taping defensive signals given to players by New York Jets coaches during a game. Legendary New England head coach Bill Belichick was fined $500,000 — the maximum allowed by the league and the largest in NFL history — while the team was stripped of its first-round pick in the following year’s draft.

Belichick in 2007, when his team was caught taping the New York Jets’ defensive signals (AP Photo/Mel Evans, File)

Is cheating successful? Well, New England won all 16 games in the 2007 regular season — but were surprisingly defeated in the Super Bowl by the New York Giants.

And it’s not just the pros on the gridiron. Last October, University of Michigan head coach Jim Harbaugh was suspended over a similar sign-stealing scandal that quickly escalated to include allegations against several other college teams. Harbaugh was suspended for multiple games, but Michigan won the U.S. college national championship upon his return. Harbaugh has since become the head coach of the Los Angeles Chargers in the NFL.

In short: teams cheat.

In a multi-million (or even billion) dollar/pound/euro industry, marginal gains like the ones described here are worth the risk of detection. For every Canada, Leeds and Michigan that gets caught, there are clubs and parties whose agents get away with it.

It’s common, but not necessarily endemic. It’s both serious and unserious, funny and frustrating. It’s a natural consequence of seeing a game as a lifeline.

Contemporary accounts show that athletes in the ancient Olympic Games were bribed to say they were from certain city-states rather than others. If caught, they faced the possible punishment of public flogging.

In fact, nothing has changed, and the punishment, at least in terms of the reputation of the guilty party, is not all that different either.

Teams are willing to take that risk.

(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)