Canada's men's and women's soccer teams have relied on drones and spying for years, sources say
Coaching staff and contractors working with Canada’s men’s and women’s national soccer teams have been engaged for years in efforts to film the closed-door training sessions of their opponents, including during the women’s gold-medal winning Olympic tournament in 2021, two sources with first-hand knowledge of the activity told TSN.
The filming also included at least one training session before a women’s national team game against Panama in July 2022, when Canada was attempting to qualify for the Women’s World Cup in Australia, one of the sources said. In that case, the source said, a Canadian contractor was caught attempting to film a private Panama training and a complaint was made by the Panamanian Football Federation to Canada Soccer and to Concacaf, the soccer confederation that governs the sport in North and Central America and the Caribbean.
The historical spying allegations come with the Canada’s women’s soccer team program under intense scrutiny at the Olympics in Paris.
The Canadian Olympic Committee said on Wednesday that assistant coach Jasmine Mander and analyst Joseph Lombardi had left the team and returned to Canada after Lombardi was caught using a drone to spy on two of New Zealand’s closed training sessions. On Thursday, Canada beat New Zealand 2-1 in their Olympic tournament opener.
Lombardi was caught by French police on Monday, after they saw him retrieve a drone that had been flying over the New Zealand team’s training, The Globe and Mail reported. The Globe reported that police retrieved footage of a second New Zealand training session from the drone and also obtained text messages between Lombardi and Mander. The text messages reportedly showed that Mander was aware of Lombardi’s activities.
After TSN published an initial version of this story, Canada Soccer chief executive Kevin Blue wrote in a statement that head coach Bev Priestman had been removed from her position for the balance of the Olympic tournament. Blue wrote that the federation had obtained new information regarding previous drone use against opponents that predates the 2024 Olympics. The Canadian Olympic Committee said that Priestman had been removed from the Olympic team.
“This is awful, the worst-case scenario,” said Amy Walsh, a former women’s national team player who now co-hosts a podcast about soccer called Footy Prime. “I feel sick to my stomach, genuinely nauseated. I understand when you get to a high level, people will be ruthless and do whatever they can to gain a competitive advantage but this is so far over the line.
“The players are benefitting from the coaches cheating. There's a certain amount of blind trust players have that coaches are doing things the right way and this is the ultimate betrayal."
Staff and contractors connected to the men’s national team have also filmed the closed training sessions of competitors, one of the sources told TSN, adding that Canada used a drone to record a U.S. training session before a Nov. 15, 2019, game in Florida. The U.S. won that game 4-1.
Two years later, Honduras stopped a training session in Toronto during World Cup qualifiers after someone spotted a drone overhead.
“I’d imagine there’s probably a lot of people in Canada that fly drones, I’m sure,” then-Canada coach John Herdman said at the time. “And when a big team like Honduras turn up I’m sure people are probably interested in what they’re doing when they come into our country. So I know for sure we won’t be heading into people’s countries too early because with drones these days, people can obviously capture footage. You’ve got to be really careful. So yeah, you got to be careful in CONCACAF. It’s a tricky place.”
Some staff and contractors were told the filming was part of their jobs and that they could lose their positions with the federation if they did not go along with the demands, one of the sources said in a series of interviews with TSN on Wednesday and Thursday.
“In a couple of scenarios, people have been pushed and have been told, ‘You have to give 110 percent and this is part of the job so if you don’t feel comfortable with doing this, you do not have a place on the team’,” the source said. “It’s not something that’s talked about and it’s not something there are a lot of text messages about because of how sensitive this is. Some of the people who have had to do the filming or review the filming have said to a few staff members how uncomfortable it was for them.”
...
www.tsn.ca
sports.yahoo.com
