Until his LinkedIn page ceased to exist, William Salt listed himself as a “First Team Performance Analyst Intern”. The word that jumps out is “intern”. Spying on an enemy 290 miles away is an unusually exotic assignment for a young person on today’s slippery cheap-labour ladder.
Until, that is, you get caught. Then you’re national news, a social-media barn fire. Salt is the Southampton employee photographed lurking unconvincingly behind a tree while allegedly filming a Middlesbrough training session before their Championship playoff semi-final, which Southampton won.
If John le Carré had written espionage like that, you would never have heard of him. Salt was easily spotted. Who, if anyone, told him to do it is not going to be running MI5 anytime soon. If he acted alone (unlikely), you could sort-of admire his ambition. If he was sent from the south coast to Teesside with a train ticket and a packed lunch, duty of care to an employee is on the list of indictments facing Southampton.
No 1 though was whether a breach of the EFL regulation that forbids “observing training sessions” should result in Tonda Eckert’s team being kicked out of Saturday’s Championship playoff final against Hull City. An Independent Disciplinary Commission will decide on Tuesday. Until then the ‘most lucrative game in English football’ is on hold.
I have my own spying story to confess. At the 2002 World Cup in Japan we were escorted out of an England training session after the usual 20-minute “open” part so Sven-Göran Eriksson’s squad could proceed with the real stuff of first XI versus reserves.
Back-page England news reporters were under the usual pressure from London to name the team for the next game. Outside the locked gates, I looked up to the wooded hillside above the training ground and said: “Why don’t you watch from up there?”
Some did, until the Football Association rumbled it, and the local authorities began circulating warnings about bears, snakes and other dangerous animals roaming the woods. FA staff joked that those creatures would flee in fear when they clocked how dangerous the English press were.
Trying to spot who was wearing a first-team bib from up a tree might be a bit desperate but it fell short of breaching journalistic ethics. The team would have leaked anyway, via family or agents. Breaking a league’s surveillance rules for a cheat code potentially worth hundreds of millions of pounds in Premier League earnings is in a different echelon.
Nothing sends a manager loopy faster than their line-up being leaked to the press
Nothing sends a manager loopy faster than their line-up being leaked to the press
Privacy, or secrecy, is an obsession of commodified sport. In 2013 Liverpool secretly paid Manchester City £1m after hacking into their scouting system. It was policy for Marco Bielsa’s Leeds to spy on opponents.
Nothing sends a manager loopy faster than their line-up being leaked to the press. It’s a principle, frequently violated, but now enshrined by regulation in many sports, that a team should be allowed to prepare for matches without bad George Smileys committing it all to film.
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These days analysts outnumber players. But algorithm and data-based scouting can only stretch so far. Imagine the thrill for a secret agent observing the actual human beings you need to beat to have a chance of being promoted to the Premier League.
Starting XI, free-kicks, set-pieces, team shape and penalty-taking habits were among the possible feasts for Will Salt’s eyes. And while the usual social media reflex of turning everything into a lark is in play (witness Saints fans dressed as trees, like Dad’s Army on manoeuvres), the authorities face the serious challenge of how to punish Southampton if the evidence turns out to be conclusive.
Was this Southampton’s first offence? Have other clubs been doing it? How much did it actually help Eckert’s side beat Boro 2-1 on aggregate? Those two games now carry an eternal asterisk.
FA Cup semi-final, a surge from 21st place in the Championship to the playoff final: it was all going so well for Southampton until a phone camera clicked beside a tree near Middlesbrough, and someone’s smart idea began to look very dumb.
Photograph by Robin Jones / Getty Images