Let’s say you’re a team preparing for a major football tournament.
You’re training, maybe doing some shooting drills, or practising a set-piece routine. You hear a buzzing noise. What is it? A helicopter? No, too quiet. A swarm of bees? No, too loud. Oh, it’s a drone. Someone is flying a drone above you. Bit weird.
Who is controlling the drone, and why is it up there? What would your instinct be? Maybe it’s some mischievous local youths, who have nicked their dad’s Mavic Pro and are amusing themselves. Maybe it’s a filmmaker, collecting some stock footage of what they thought was just a field. Maybe it’s an oblivious amateur enthusiast who has no idea an elite sports team are busily preparing for some big games.
Would most people’s first thought honestly be, ‘That simply must be one of our upcoming opponents spying on us’? You would think the majority of the planet’s residents simply aren’t that paranoid, that their instinct is not that this is all part of some nefarious spying mission from another team to gain some notional advantage.
Broadly because the instinct is to ask the question: why?
This scenario has the Canadian women’s Olympic football team tumbling into chaos after it emerged that the drone caught flying over a training session for their group opponents New Zealand this week was actually controlled by Joseph Lombardi, one of Canada Soccer’s group of analysts.
He and an assistant coach, Jasmine Mander, were immediately sent home after the incident. Head coach Bev Priestman initially recused herself from the game against New Zealand on Thursday, with the expectation she would be back on the touchline for the match with France on Sunday. But she too was then banished, after it emerged this might not have been the first time Canada, or people associated with the Canadian football teams, had pulled a stunt like this.
On Friday, Canada Soccer CEO Kevin Blue expressed concern about “a potential long-term, deeply embedded systemic culture of this type of thing occurring”, having been made aware of drone usage at the men’s Copa America in the United States earlier this summer. It’s unclear, at the time of writing, whether Priestman will be fired or not.
Amazingly, amid all of this, defending women’s football gold medallists Canada beat New Zealand 2-1 in Saint-Etienne on Thursday (below), but there has been talk of a points deduction as the outrage continues.
(Arnaud Finistre/AFP via Getty Images)
This sort of behaviour is probably ‘not on’. There is something rather underhand about trying to spy on an opponent’s preparation.
We know how protective football teams are about their spaces, whether that’s the dressing room, the team bus, or the training field. During the recent men’s European Championship in Germany, the England camp were annoyed that a prospective formation change had been leaked to the media, while the France team criticised journalists who filmed them practising penalties.
But you do keep coming back to the question: why? Why would you bother? What significant advantage could you gain from filming a training session with a drone?
Maybe you’ll see a formation being worked on. Perhaps a clever bit of set-piece choreography. If you’re lucky, a player suffering an injury that, in the normal run of things, a team might want to keep quiet. That’s about it, though.
Teams these days have access to such astonishing amounts of data and footage that they could take down, say, a global software network with the sheer weight of information.
They have Wyscout, which, if you’re not familiar, is a video platform that allows you to watch just about any game you could possibly imagine. And if not Wyscout, a similar resource, or even their own library of footage. They have multiple sources for statistics, including in many cases their own databases. They have nutritionists, physiotherapists, doctors, psychologists and specialists in every athletic area you can think of. They also have good old-fashioned scouting, involving the maverick concept of a human being going to watch an actual football game then reporting what they saw.
With all of that in mind, what substantive additional information is some probably slightly grainy drone footage going to give you? Is it really worth the risk?
Because if you get caught, stuff like your head coach being sent home in disgrace and your entire campaign being tainted could happen. It’s a bit like leaning too far out over a balcony railing to get a better view of the bay: yes, you might see slightly more sea and maybe catch a glimpse of that little island you can only reach with a rowing boat, but equally, you could fall and brain yourself on the street below.
Perhaps, though, this misunderstands the fundamental psyche of people involved at the top level of football, or elite sport more generally.
There is protectiveness, there is paranoia, but there is also an almost pathological desire to prepare, over-prepare, hyper-prepare and if there are any other more dramatic words to emphasise how much they try to prepare, throw them in, too.
You could file this in the ‘marginal gains’ box, alongside things such as bringing everyone’s personal pillow on away trips or banning pepper, as new Chelsea manager Enzo Maresca’s fitness coach apparently once did. If there is any vague possibility of gaining even the smallest insight or gleaning the slightest morsel of information from a training session, then up the drone will go.
As with many things, now Uruguay men’s national-team head coach Marcelo Bielsa probably provided the best example of this. He was involved in football’s previous most prominent ‘spying scandal’, when, as Leeds United manager, one of his staff was caught with a pair of binoculars watching Derby County, one of their main rivals for promotion to the Premier League, train shortly before a match between the two sides.
(Lindsey Parnaby/AFP via Getty Images)
Bielsa apologised when his man was collared and subsequently held a lengthy press conference/rudimentary TED talk in which he explained to the gathered journalists, in punishing detail and with the help of a PowerPoint presentation, the depth of his preparation for every game.
That was remarkable enough, but even more so was Bielsa’s admission that he knew most of it was essentially pointless.
“I don’t need to watch a training session to know where they play,” he said. “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.
“I give this explanation to make you understand why I think I am not cheating, by doing something that is not illegal. I know I am not trying to get an advantage. I already have the information. I repeat: why do I do it? Because I think I’m stupid.”
In Derby’s first game after the ‘scandal’ was uncovered, which was on the same day as Bielsa’s bravura performance for the media, their manager Frank Lampard walked into his post-match press conference after they had beaten Southampton in an FA Cup tie brandishing a bulging folder full of notes. It was a prop, and Lampard loudly informed a room of largely baffled journalists that they do their preparation, too, you know. The subtext being that it wasn’t just that eccentric South American intellectual you lot all love who bones up before games.
In that case, Bielsa didn’t lose his job, the only lasting impact was a lingering enmity between the two clubs and ultimately Derby went on to beat Leeds a few months later in one of the most brilliantly chaotic promotion play-off semi-final second legs (below) you could ever hope to see. Ironically, it was the sort of illogically thrilling game that no amount of preparation would make sense of.
(Alex Livesey/Getty Images)
The crucial part of Bielsa’s explanation was how it “allows me to keep my anxiety low”.
While we can’t speculate on the anxiety levels of the Canada camp, their motivation is almost certainly similar. It’s not about the actual information they might have got from their drone, more the knowledge that its use means they have all bases covered, or at least they can tell themselves that they have all bases covered. They are satisfied they have done everything they possibly can — and more — to get ready for a game.
So yes, filming an opponent’s training session with a drone is probably pointless, but in the minds of some football people at least, that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying.
(Top photo, drone stock image: Visionhaus/Getty Images)
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