Kim Hellberg was clearly upset and his press conference after Middlesbrough’s defeat at Southampton in the Championship semi‑final playoff second leg became unexpectedly moving as a result. In football, the Boro manager said, you accept that some teams have greater resources than others but where the coach of the less well-off team can gain an advantage is in the “tactical element”; it is in effect the only weapon he has. And if that weapon is made less effective by an opponent cheating, it is understandable that Hellberg should feel that his profession, the skillset he has developed to test himself against his peers, has been betrayed.
That disgust is, no doubt, genuine enough, and it is perhaps difficult for those of us who do not work in that world fully to grasp how frustrating it must be if strategies and ploys carefully conceived and practised are rendered ineffective, not by the in-game acuity of an opponent, but by espionage. But it is admittedly hard to square that righteous anger with the image published in the Mail this week of a sheepish young man lurking behind a tree with a phone.
How much difference espionage makes in football depends who you speak to. Some are sceptical about the benefits, but others point out that specific pressing or set-piece plans could be decisive. Would Newcastle, say, have been caught out by Arsenal’s short-corner routine had they expected it?
The bigger problem with discussing Spygate, though, is the sense of farce that surrounds it. The language is that of invisible ink, fake beards and newspapers with holes cut in them. “‘Can I borrow a match?’ ‘I use a lighter.’” Even the suggestion that the spy was a “lone wolf”, a rogue operative, makes the whole thing seem ridiculous.
What next? Lamplighters? Scalphunters? Pavement artists? Bugs in the dressing room? Sleepers planted in rivals’ youth systems ready to bring down clubs from the inside? Teams deliberately planting fake set-piece plans to mislead opponents into diverting resources to defend the far post when in fact the assault is coming at the near (OPERATION TOM-INCE-MEAT, perhaps)?
For the media, it is all reminiscent of major tournaments, when a certain absurdity takes hold and the routine of trotting along to the training ground for 10 minutes with Danny Mills or Scott Carson is alleviated by covert missions, a different pair of journalists dispatched each day to try to catch a glimpse of training beyond the allotted 15 minutes for what it might suggest about possible lineups.
In Baden-Baden in 2006, the Football Association responded by spreading rumours that the hills overlooking England’s training pitch were infested with snakes and threatening to withdraw accreditations. The day after a particularly spiky exchange between the press officer and journalists, the word had got round: proper subterfuge this time, nothing provocative, don’t, whatever you do, get caught.
One of the next day’s pair – we’ll call him X, prominent then but an even more public figure now – insisted he would be extra‑careful as he set off through the forest. After watching the allotted 15 minutes of training, a journalist, wondering how X was getting on, glanced up into the trees, where a gleaming white shirt, the sort of white Persil could only dream of, shone out like a beacon.
Cue frantic phone calls to tell X to put his jacket back on, while others tried to distract the press officer. The same X was then caught again in Rustenburg four years later peering through binoculars while wearing a white blazer, as though birdwatching on his way to play baccarat with Le Chiffre.
Spying has always gone on in football, although for a long time the espionage was largely amateurish. The story is told of an England manager this century who secreted two men inside Wembley to watch a training session, only for his spies to prove unable to identify any of the opposing players, reduced to making vague inswinging gestures with their hands.
But spying took off as a potential scandal in 2019 when a member of Leeds’ staff was found outside Derby’s training ground. Marcelo Bielsa, the Leeds manager, responded in typically idiosyncratic fashion, saying he was a compulsive analyser, professing surprise that this was seen as a problem in England and acknowledging he had spied on previous opponents that season.
Even though the Leeds agent was on public land, they were fined £200,000 for failing to act in “utmost good faith” to a fellow club. Only then did the Football League introduce Regulation 127 that “no Club shall directly or indirectly observe (or attempt to observe) another Club’s training session in the period of 72 hours prior to any match scheduled to be played between those respective Club”.
Both Canada’s men’s and women’s teams were found to have used drones to spy on opponents in 2024. At the men’s Copa América, a fine was issued and the accreditation of the staff member involved was revoked. At the Olympics, the Canada women’s head coach, Bev Priestman, and assistant coach and an analyst were banned for a year and Canada docked six points, while the drone operator was given an eight-month suspended prison sentence under French law, which bans drones being flown over people and recordings shared without their consent.
The EFL regulation refers to “sporting sanction”. It is hard to see what that could amount to and still be meaningful if it were not to award the game to Middlesbrough. For all the chaos that would entail, the media release on Thursday warning the final could be delayed suggests that is being considered, although logistics make that seem impractical.
The independent panel has a huge decision to make. Award the game to Middlesbrough and they deny Southampton a one-off game to win entry into the Premier League and the upwards of £180m a year that entails. But equally, however bathetic an intern in the shrubbery may seem, if Southampton are found guilty, this is industrial espionage.
Stealing ideas is wrong, and there probably does need to be a zero-tolerance approach even if only to prevent escalation and full-on criminal surveillance. At some level, football has to maintain its sense of integrity, and Hellberg’s emotional response shows just how against the code this goes. However you look at it, lone men lurking in the undergrowth should probably be discouraged.
