Spies, drones and hijacked transfers: Football’s sneakiest sneaks revealed

Canada’s women will be without their manager Beverly Priestman for their first game of the Olympics after a drone was flown over a training session being held by opponents New Zealand.

Priestman has ‘voluntarily withdrawn’ from taking charge of the game and apologised for the incident after New Zealand lodged a complaint with the IOC.

Football has a long history of silly spying shenanigans and other crafty little clandestine operations, of course…

Marcelo Bielsa’s Spygate
When the local media turned up to a hastily-arranged press conference at Leeds United’s training ground in January 2019, the general assumption was that the Argentine was about to resign in some disgrace.

Derby County had called the police just a few days before to take a member of Bielsa’s backroom staff away from their training ground after he was spotted watching on with ‘pliers, binoculars and disguised clothing’, which we choose to believe was a trenchcoat and a pair of those novelty glasses with attached eyebrows, big nose and moustache.

Instead, Bielsa revealed that he had not only allowed Derby to be spied on, but that he had been doing it all season long to every Championship opponent, running through a detailed PowerPoint presentation of how they did it and why the information they gleaned paled into comparison to what they would compile just from watching teams in actual matches instead.

That sort of raises the question of why they even bothered in the first place – a point Bielsa acknowledged, in fairness – but Derby boss Frank Lampard was not impressed nonetheless.

The Rams got some measure of revenge by beating Leeds in the play-off semi-finals later that season, but the last laugh was ultimately had in Yorkshire as, unlike Derby, they actually went up to the Premier League in 2020; County were relegated to League One two years later and have only just made their return.

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Argentinian government accused of setting G-men on Lionel Messi
Part of Bielsa’s defence had been that spying on training sessions was commonplace in Argentina – a claim backed up by Mauricio Pochettino – but we’re not sure that necessarily extends to involving federal agents in their investigations.

That was the allegation made against the Argentinian government after a protracted scandal that rattled on for years. In brief: an anonymous hack into South American offshore companies led to millions of documents, known as the Panama Papers, being published in 2015.

The papers alleged that several high-profile politicians were tax-dodging…as well as Lionel Messi and his father. The pair denied any wrongdoing, but were found guilty of tax evasion by a Spanish court in 2016, with their seven-figure fines substantially reduced on appeal the following year.

Around the same time, a sensational report in the Argentinian press alleged that the Argentinian government had sent a shadowy figure ‘known only as Agent G’ to surveil Messi in Barcelona.

And that wasn’t the end of it: the matter ended up in court in early 2020 to see if the alleged spying on 60 people, including Messi, was carried out entirely legally. Then the covid pandemic hit, and any further mention of Messi in the whole affair became difficult to come by – especially as the story was overtaken by much, much more widespread allegations of government spying on regular citizens, the full extent of which is still getting unravelled now.

Heavy stuff. Let’s have something more fun, eh?

The missing 1996 World Cup final ball
With Euro 96 approaching, the Daily Mirror became aware that Geoff Hurst did not, in fact, have the ball from the 1966 World Cup final, as tradition dictated he should have done having scored a hat-trick and everything. The striker was seemingly totally unaware of where the ball had gone after the game.

The mystery would have taken Sherlock Holmes just minutes to solve: West Germany’s Helmut Haller, who scored the opening goal, had picked up the ball on the final whistle and carried it off, heading up to the royal box to receive his runners-up medal from the Queen with the ball still clutched under his arm.

We doubt whether he or anybody else gave it very much thought: he had even congratulated the England players on the pitch while holding the ball, apparently completely unchallenged.

Haller returned the ball to Germany and gave it to his son Jurgen for his fifth birthday, but because children are very irritating and not to be trusted, later took it back off him and hid it in his basement.

There it sat for 30 years until the Mirror came calling, eventually paying £80,000 to prise it away from Haller and convince him to come back to England to present it to Hurst. It’s now on display in the National Football Museum in Manchester.

Jose Mourinho hiding in a hamper
Had to get a mention, didn’t it? The then- Chelsea boss was given a touchline ban for his side’s 2005 Champions League quarter-final against Bayern Munich, which also forbade him from having contact with the players before or during the game.

Of course, being Mourinho, he decided to just ignore that, eventually going with a stratagem that an eight-year-old would think was less than foolproof, but which worked nonetheless.

As Mourinho himself explained years later: “I go to the dressing room during the day so I was there from midday and the game is seven o’clock. I just want to be in the dressing room when the players arrive. I went there and nobody saw me. The problem was to leave after. And Stewart Bannister the kit man put me in the basket. It was a little bit open so I could breathe.

“But when he is taking it outside the dressing room, the UEFA guys were following and desperate to find me so he closed the box and I couldn’t breathe! When he opened the box I was dying! I am serious! I was claustrophobic, I promise! It’s true!”

Emmanuel Petit makes Spurs pay for Arsenal meeting
It’s 1997, and Spurs chairman Alan Sugar had selected French midfielder Emmanuel Petit to be his next Apprentice after his sensational pitch to capitalise on the image rights to his ponytail by starring in L’Oreal commercials. Also he’d sign for Tottenham we guess.

Petit came over to London for a meeting, heard Sugar out, said he needed a couple of days to mull it over, got in the taxi Spurs had booked to take him back to his hotel…and instructed the cabbie to take him to Arsene Wenger’s house instead.

In those days the address of every London club’s manager was still a required part of The Knowledge, so off they went. Petit agreed a deal to move to Arsenal, and Spurs were still left to foot the taxi fare. Crafty.

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