Sports expert Marianne Miettinen has a clear opinion on the Canadian women’s soccer team spying scandal.
– Unfortunately, it is quite common these days that all means are used to maximize profits. We go into the gray area and even beyond it, like here. I personally think that this is an outrageous act, Miettinen stated.
The Canadian women’s national soccer team is defending Olympic gold in Paris, and the coaching staff has taken all possible means to their disposal.
An unaccredited team official was arrested on Monday for flying a drone over the New Zealand women’s soccer team training in Saint-Étienne. Drones are prohibited from flying above the Olympic venues for safety reasons.
Canada won the match 2–1.
According to Miettinen, coaches use drones a lot as a tool for tactical training, because with a drone you can film the entire field and all the players at the same time. It offers coaches a good addition to tactical training, where it is important to see players’ placements and distances, possibly spaces or problems.
The actions of the Canadian team have dismayed people other than Mietti. For example, guarding Sweden’s goal in the Tokyo final Hedvig Lindahl considered what happened to be a “super scandal”.
– How large-scale it (activity) is is a big question, but it is a scam. It’s getting an advantage that no one else has, Lindahl said In an interview with Aftonbladet.
According to sources from the Canadian channel TSN both the Canadian women’s and men’s teams have secretly filmed their opponents’ closed practices. Also Sweden’s training before the Olympic final in Tokyo, which Canada won 3–2 after penalty kicks.
Use the drone to directly catch the opponent’s game
If a drone was used to spy on an opponent, it could find out, for example, patterns of special situations or how the opponent plays in offensive and defensive games or which options are used for movement.
Often in finishing drills, teams play with half of the team playing like the upcoming opponent, and the other half practicing the patterns the team will use to defend or attack the upcoming opponent and their style of play. According to Miettinen, if you could spy on this kind of training with a drone, the team would be able to directly catch the opponent’s style of play.
– Then the opponent could be defended in exactly the right way.
In Miettinen’s opinion, using drones to spy on the opponent is not within the bounds of good taste. All teams have the opportunity to observe their opponents in games and do video analysis by fair means.
So is the benefit of spying on exercises worth the risk?
Canada’s coaching staff paid dearly for being caught, as the team’s unaccredited analyst Joseph Lombardi and assistant coach Jasmine Mander was removed from the Olympic team and later also the head coach Bev Priestman was dismissed from coaching the team at least for the duration of the Paris Games.
Miettinen reminds that in a top tournament like the Olympics, the margin differences are so small that individual special situations and defending them can make the necessary difference to the opponent.
– Olympic gold is a pretty big deal, and in Canada it is financially important for the players. The Canadian team has been fighting for their position all along, and for them to win Olympic gold is certainly a meaningful thing. They have chosen this path, but I would never choose it myself.
Colorful espionage companies
During his career, Miettinen, who works as the top football manager of Pallloiito, has coached several teams and encountered some kind of espionage attempts.
In European Championship qualifiers abroad, the team often has a local contact person, who is usually a local junior coach or similar. They move with the team, and according to Miettinen, you can never know if they tell others how the Finns train or if they take pictures of the training.
Miettinen has also remembered a couple of examples from the youth EC qualifiers in Eerikkilä. In one, the representative of Bosnia-Herzegovina tried to covertly film Finland’s training from the balcony, while in the other, the Polish team made their physical trainer jog around the adjacent field in civilian clothes. In the latter situation, Finland Olga Ahtinen had practiced the models with which Finland tried to open the Polish press.
– We didn’t recognize him and we wondered who the fool was running back and forth over there. Then, when our game was about to start, I went to tell Olga that now that man is on the field, our models have been seen. We decided to see if our system worked, and if it hadn’t worked, we would have gone back to the old way, Miettinen said.
– In the end, we won the game by quite a large number and went on to the first basket. We were able to react to it quite quickly and fortunately we had other tricks up our sleeves than just that one method.
Miettinen admits that he himself has touched the gray area, so to speak. If he has walked past the opponent’s training, then he has slowed down. He has also gone to observe the opponent’s games on site before the European Championship qualifiers in civilian clothes so that he would not be recognized.
Once also in the U17 girls’ EC final tournament, the Dutch team had forgotten their special situation tag on the wall of the locker room. Finland’s coaching staff took the pictures off the record, and the team knew how to defend special situations in the match perfectly.
– It wasn’t intentional spying, because they themselves forgot the note in the booth. I personally think that all fair means are used to spy on the opponent, and may the better team win.