Saints and sinners: if Southampton are found guilty of spying they should be punished | Jonathan Wilson

Middlesbrough manager Kim Hellberg with his dejected players after their defeat at Southampton. Photograph: Simon Dael/Shutterstock

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.

England’s Wayne Rooney, Sol Campbell and Theo Walcott during training session at the 2006 World Cup. The training sessions in Baden-Baden were often spied on by journalists. Photograph: Eddie Keogh/Reuters

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.