Online Reporter
SEVERAL sports teams around the world have paid a hefty price for spying on their opponents over the years but the potential financial cost to English football club Southampton for their infraction could be the heaviest.
Southampton were expelled from the Championship play-off final by the English Football League on Tuesday after admitting to filming training sessions of other clubs, including Middlesbrough, their opponents in the semi-finals.
The play-off final is frequently described as the “richest match in football” because the winners are promoted to the English Premier League and therefore guaranteed around 200 million pounds (US$268.10 million) in future earnings.
Southampton, nicknamed “The Saints” and based on the south coast of England, are set to appeal the severity of the punishment, but if it holds, the ramifications of the sanction would dwarf any previous financial penalty for espionage in sport.
The McLaren Formula One team were fined US$100 million in 2007 after receiving a confidential copy of Ferrari’s car design from a disgruntled former employee of the Italian team.
The leak came to light when the McLaren engineer asked his wife to photocopy the document and she took it to a high street copy shop.
Unfortunately for McLaren, the employee at the shop was a Ferrari fan, who immediately tipped off the team.
As well as the unprecedented fine, McLaren were stripped of all constructors’ championships points for the season, and Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen pipped McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso to the drivers’ title in the last race of the year.
The term “Spygate” was first attached to a sports story in the US when the NFL’s New England Patriots were sanctioned US$250 000 in 2007 for videotaping the coaching signals of their opponents from an unauthorised location during games.
The Patriots, who had won three Super Bowls in that decade, also lost a first-round pick in the 2008 draft, while coach Bill Belichick was fined a record US$500 000. The team again fell foul of the league and were fined US$1.1 million in 2020 after admitting their television crew had filmed on the sidelines of a game between the Cincinnati Bengals and Cleveland Browns.
A similar case in baseball cost the Houston Astros a US$5 million fine after an MLB investigation found the club used a video camera system to steal opposing teams’ signs during the 2017 and 2018 seasons. — AFP Sport.
