Southampton’s head coach, Tonda Eckert, initiated the practice of spying on opponents, according to new documents which also show that an intern tasked with recording rival training sessions was assured the “manager loved it”.
Southampton were expelled from the Championship playoffs last month after they were found to have spied on Oxford United, Ipswich and Middlesbrough. Eckert is under investigation by the Football Association and newly published remarks from the panel which rejected the club’s appeal against their expulsion lend credence to the belief he was central to the project.
According to the written reasons of an English Football League arbitration panel, the first instance of spying took place before Southampton’s Boxing Day fixture against Oxford and was prompted by the head coach. “Mr Eckert asked if someone could go to observe the Oxford training session to see how they were lining up and whether a particular player [Cameron Brannagan] was fit to play,” the panel notes. Eckert told a disciplinary commission he had been surprised to find such actions were against the rules.
Eckert made his suggestion in a meeting of Southampton’s analysis team, the panel writes, and an analyst identified an intern to undertake the job. In written evidence to the commission, the intern said he “didn’t really have an option” over accepting the instruction and “wasn’t provided an opportunity to say no”.
After the intern had observed two Oxford training sessions he sent “updates, photographs and videos” back to the club “concerning matters such as tactical shape and player selection”, the panel writes. Eckert says he did not watch footage from the sessions. He did, however, have a phone conversation with the intern after the sessions had been observed, according to the panel, and a member of the analysis team wrote to the intern on WhatsApp: “Try and make out as much as you can please. You legend. Manager loved it.”
In April, the panel writes, the intern was asked to surveil Ipswich while the team trained for a fixture at Southampton at the ground of nearby Eastleigh. The intern said he was told “the boss is adamant that someone needs to go” but refused to take on the task. An academy analyst was chosen instead and recorded footage of a session. Eckert told the commission he had been made aware of the footage two hours before kick-off and that he thought it had been recorded on CCTV by Eastleigh.
The third instance was against Middlesbrough. The original intern was asked to undertake the assignment and agreed, arguing later that he had felt his job would have been at risk had he not. He was also, according to the panel, criticised by Eckert for not flying up immediately upon accepting the assignment. His visit went on to become notorious after he was caught filming a training session. The intern had waited on Eckert’s instruction to return home but left when it never arrived and learned of the accusations made against the club on the train home. According to the panel, Eckert told the commission that “the videos were of poor quality, taken from far distance and so, they were of no benefit to him”.
Southampton’s appeal against their removal from the playoffs and a four-point deduction in the Championship next season was rejected by the panel. They found the club gained sporting advantage from their spying – noting “sporting advantage is different from sporting success” – and found previous precedents for applying a stringent sporting sanction in such cases. The FA’s investigation is ongoing.
