A new Spygate scandal could emerge after Canadian soccer coach Bev Priestman was sent home from the Paris Olympics amid a series of drone spying allegations.
Canada Soccer confirmed Thursday that Priestman was suspended after “additional information” was brought to their attention regarding “previous use of drones against opponents prior to the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.”
Earlier this week, assistant coach Jasmine Mander and analyst Joseph Lombardi were also sent home.
Assistant coach Andy Spence will replace Priestman for the remainder of the tournament after team members reportedly used drones to spy on rivals New Zealand. Canada lost 2-1 in the first round.
The decision to suspend Priestman just one day before the Games’ opening ceremony follows a bombshell TSN Reportstating that “coaches and contractors working with the Canadian men’s and women’s national soccer teams have been filming their opponents’ closed training sessions for years.”
Canadian women’s soccer coach Bev Priestman sent home from Paris Olympics
Canada Soccer employees reportedly used drones to spy on rivals New Zealand earlier this week
Multiple sources told the site that the team engaged in espionage during the 2021 Women’s Olympic tournament, where they won the gold medal.
The well-placed insiders, described as having “direct knowledge of the activities,” also claimed the filming took place before a “match between the women’s national team and Panama in July 2022, as Canada attempts to qualify for the Women’s World Cup in Australia.”
Some staff members were reportedly told they could lose their jobs if they failed to comply with orders regarding filming rival teams.
“In a number of scenarios, people have been put under pressure and told, ‘You have to give 110 percent and this is part of the job. If you are not comfortable with this, you have no place on the team,'” one of the sources said.
“It’s not something that’s talked about and it’s not something that gets a lot of text messages because it’s such a sensitive issue. Some of the people who have had to do the filming or review the filming have said to some of the staff how uncomfortable it was for them.”
It is still unclear whether players were aware of the strategy to record their rivals’ training sessions.
FIFA’s disciplinary committee said earlier it had opened proceedings against Canada Soccer
Priestman is one of three coaches being investigated in connection with the scandal
Insiders also claimed that staff from the men’s national team filmed their competitors’ closed training sessions, including the U.S. training session ahead of a November 2019 match in Florida.
Both sources explained that filming an opponent’s training session had several advantages.
“You learn their formations, their starting line-up,” said one insider. “You also look at who takes the penalty and their set-pieces.”
They added: ‘Most people see this as cheating, which it is. Some of our coaches just see it as a competitive advantage and justify it by saying everyone does it, which is also not true. Not everyone cheats and neither should we.’
The scandal is reminiscent of the NFL’s Spygate scandal of 2007, in which coach Bill Belichick’s New England Patriots were caught recording hand gestures from the rival New York Jets on the sidelines in an attempt to gain insight into game decisions.
After a lengthy legal battle, Belichick was fined $500,000 for his role, while the Patriots were fined $250,000 and stripped of their first-round pick in the 2008 NFL Draft.
Another espionage scandal in baseball broke out around the Houston Astros, who won the world championship in 2017.
In 2020, Major League Baseball released the results of an investigation that revealed that a system was in place in 2017 that allowed players to steal hand signals, allowing the Astros’ dugout to intercept and decipher hand signals between opposing pitchers and catchers.
As first detailed in a 2019 article in The Athletic, the organization recorded opposing team hand signals using a video camera in the center field bleachers at Houston’s Minute Maid Park. Players in the dugout watched a live camera feed to decipher the signals and relay that information to batters by hitting a trash can. Typically, one or two pops would signal that the Astros had a breaking ball, while no pops would indicate that the fastball was inbounds.
That plan resulted in suspensions for former Houston coach Alex Cora, who was then manager of the Red Sox and is still in Boston, as well as general manager Jeff Luhnow and manager AJ Hinch.
Several Astros players have apologized for their roles in the scheme, including third baseman Alex Bregman, but publicly the team continues to be troubled by the scandal even after winning the 2022 World Series, allegedly without any sign theft.