Flying a drone over the opponents’ training session to gather information is perhaps the most indiscreet piece of espionage carried out in recent sporting history. The buzzing saucers with spidery limbs are spotted everywhere, from weddings and funerals to political rallies and warfronts, underwater and in outer space too. So it was not a piece of improvised spying when some members of the Canadian women’s football employed drones to peep into New Zealand’s training session before their counter.
The price they paid for the brain-fade was too costly — six points were penalised, FIFA banned coach Bev Priestman and two other officials, the Canadian football association were fined 200,000 Swiss francs, and beyond all tangibles, the credibility and integrity of the reigning football champions in Olympics stood tarnished.
Some of them would be wondering whether droning was worth all these. For, how much more valuable information would they have gathered about a team that they already possess a mine of details. In this day and age, there is an inexhaustible amount of data at any team’s disposal, so long as you have a stable internet connection and the knowhow of entering the correct address to extract the details you want. From formations and footage, from statistics and pattern of play, there is nothing secretive about any team.
Canada team celebrates their side’s 2-1 win at the end of the women’s Group A soccer match between Canada and France at Geoffroy-Guichard stadium during the 2024 Summer Olympic. (AP)
A couple of observations the day before a group match between teams ranked eighth (Canada) and 28th (New Zealand), wouldn’t make a decisive difference. Maybe, you could note down a peculiar set-piece drill, or an unusual formation, or the general spirit, or find out about injuries. Any revelations wouldn’t have changed their own methods or approach dramatically.
In the end, it comes across as an act of naivety or maybe cowardice. Then, it is a mistake far bigger teams than Canada and far revered coaches than Priestman have stooped to. The most famous spy-gate episode involved the most celebrated modern-day manager, the Argentine ideologue of attacking football Marcelo Bielsa. During his time at Leeds United, The police confiscated a backroom staff, in disguise, with pliers, binoculars and cameras in tow, outside Derby County’s training ground in 2019. The two clubs were then locked in an intense race for promotion.
He immediately rang his counterpart Frank Lampard, but instead of an apology, he defended his staff’s act. The next day, he walked into the media room and stirred one of the longest press conferences in the history of the league. It lasted 66 minutes and included a powerpoint presentation on his preparations for a match. “I don’t need to watch a training session to know where and how they play. Why do I go? Because it’s not forbidden, I didn’t know it would create such a reaction, and even though going and watching an opponent is not useful, it allows me to keep my anxiety low,” he explained, adding that it’s a common practice in Argentina. Bielsa never did clandestine training sessions either. “Everyone could watch what I am doing. I never made a fuss of it,” he further defended himself.
For him, and several others raised in the pre-digital era, it was just a habit of the past that they can’t kick off despite the leap of technologic faith. Lampard’s mentor Jose Mourinho often deputed his assistant and later the successor at Chelsea Andres Villas-Boas to watch the opponents’ before every game to observe their “mental and physical state”. Lampard, though, made a fuss of Bielsa’s “unsporting” methods. In his next game, he brought a pile of notes and told the journalists that “they too prepare” in a dig at Bielsa.
A year before the EPL’s spygate, a newspaper revealed that Werder Bremen used a drone to spy on Hoffenheim. But the latter’s then manager Julian Nagelsmann, whose father was an undercover agent in real life, took the incident on a lighter vein. “I’m not really angry at the analyst doing his job. I am happy in a sense that a strong opponent is really worried that they are spying on us,” he would say. Bremen’s management, while admitting that a scout of theirs was operating the drone from a car parked 500 metres outside the training ground, said they had “unmasked” several spies from trees, autograph hunters and among the press contingent.
Before the use of extensive data analysis, it was common for teams to snoop around their opponents. Managers, players and support staff used to be wary of potential covert operations. Former England manager Graham Taylor was so finicky about eavesdroppers that he even refused security at the training ground during practice. So it was understandable that he changed the team’s training base at the last minute before a World Cup qualifier against Norway in 1993.
The venue was nondescript, but coincidentally it shared the fence with the sports editor of a leading daily. On the morning of the match, he wrote a detailed piece on England’s tactics, and as fate had it, Norway beat England 2-0, England failed to qualify and Taylor duly met the axe. In a similar bout of paranoia, Chile were convinced that Colombia had a secret gaze on them through a drone. The police shot it down, only to realise that it belonged to their telecommunication department, and ended up paying them a compensation of $5000.
The history does not absolve Canada of their misadventure, but in this advanced age of technology sending a drone over their opponent’s training ground was naive, if not utterly foolish. And it clearly was not worth this risk, money or time.
