When describing his past experiences of spying in Germany and Italy, where he worked as assistant manager to Patrick Vieira at Genoa, Eckert said: “I don’t want to say this to excuse anything we have done, I just want to give you context of the football world I grew up in.”
Indeed, the Southampton scandal is not the first spying case in which teams Eckert has worked for have been accused, though the level of his involvement in those previous incidents is unclear.
In 2015 the German newspaper Kicker reported that Cologne – where Eckert was working as a youth coach – had sent an analyst to spy on Hamburg during a warm-weather training camp in Dubai.
And at the 2014 World Cup, suspicion fell on Germany when France manager Didier Deschamps said he had to stop a private training session because a drone was flying overhead. Eckert worked as an analyst for the team.
“We don’t want any intrusion into our privacy but it’s hard to fight this these days,” Deschamps said.
The reason it is hard to ascertain to what extent spying has been a part of Eckert’s development is he has conducted no media interviews since the scandal broke.
He fell foul of the EFL’s rule outlawing watching opponents train within 72 hours of a match. Had the staff member gone days earlier, as Eckert had originally asked, they would have escaped sanction on a technicality.
“The whole thing was stupid and ill-conceived,” says Steve Grant, co-host of the Total Saints podcast.
“But it is a very British thing to clutch our pearls at the concept of fair play [regarding spying] while being happy for our centre-forward to dive in the penalty area.”
Eckert’s claim that he was unaware of the EFL’s rules has also come in for criticism, given he previously spent a year and a half working as assistant manager at Barnsley in League One.
“There is definitely a cultural difference between Germany and England,” Hatchard adds.
“But for somebody who is so detail-oriented in his coaching, I am staggered that Eckert didn’t take the time to think, ‘right, I know this happens more often in Germany, but can I really do it here?’
“Once you’re the main guy it’s pretty unforgivable to not think about the gravity of what he was doing, how it would be perceived, and what the consequences may be.”
