The Spygate Saga

[Saint86]

5 minutes ago, trousers said:

Amateurs...

Get ready for Military grade drone defenses in the Championship next season...

[Zorba]

18 hours ago, badgerx16 said:

No. The overspend is because promotion bonuses paid to the team have pushed them £6M over the PSR limit. As long as they can raise £6M in transfer fees before the official start of the season they will be fine.

Once the new season officially starts they will be able to splurge as much dosh as they want.

£6m for OMB? I’d be happy enough with that.

[Football Special]

18 hours ago, EssEffCee said:

Apparently the bonuses are tied into next year and they'd be on course to breach regardless.

They'll make the required sales anyway, though might have to take smaller offers now this is all out there.

Logical approach now is for Middlesbrough to take legal action 

[die Mannyschaft]

Is it realistic Tonda will get an 18 month ban by FA? Still nothing from club to say Tonda is the manager next season.

[Charlie Wayman]

On 16/06/2026 at 18:50, spyinthesky said:

Perleese!!!
Dont demean yourself by using American English.
Plenty of proper English such as 'from the beginning'. 'from the outset' etc etc😉

or 'Start" even?

[beatlesaint]

4 hours ago, die Mannyschaft said:

Is it realistic Tonda will get an 18 month ban by FA? Still nothing from club to say Tonda is the manager next season.

No, he didn’t bribe the opposition to lose matches ffs.

 

[LiberalCommunist]

Jesus, its hotter than Gibson's May rage today!

 

(sorry, worst bump ever.......)

Edited Tuesday at 10:09 by LiberalCommunist

[Secret Site Agent]

On 18/06/2026 at 10:36, trousers said:

Amateurs...

And where was Will Salt when this happened, ummm?  He's been upto his old tricks again, maybe?

[trousers]

Excuse the language and shouting but... WHAT THE FUCK IS TAKING THE FA SO LONG TO INVESTIGATE ECKART & CO?

 

 

[Window Cleaner]

1 minute ago, trousers said:

Excuse the language and shouting but... WHAT THE FUCK IS TAKING THE FA SO LONG TO INVESTIGATE ECKART & CO?

 

 

Holidays I expect, they've probably all buggered off to the WC with their cut price(euphemism) tickets.

[BarberSaint]

On 17/06/2026 at 15:12, Holmes_and_Watson said:

It's an overspend generated the moment they won the final. Right up until that moment, there was no overspend.

So, 'boro can't claim Hull had any competitive advantage from an overspend during the game. Not that they won't try, probably.

 

 

Ignore. 

 

Should have read thread first.

Edited Tuesday at 11:07 by BarberSaint
Remove the rubbish - i.e. what I posted.

[trousers]

16 minutes ago, Window Cleaner said:

Holidays I expect, they've probably all buggered off to the WC with their cut price(euphemism) tickets.

It's amazing how these football authorities can act swiftly when it suits them.... Twats

[Weston Super Saint]

On 23/06/2026 at 11:51, trousers said:

Excuse the language and shouting but... WHAT THE FUCK IS TAKING THE FA SO LONG TO INVESTIGATE ECKART & CO?

 

 

They're ALL ON FUCKING HOLIDAY during the summer.  Not sure that should come as a surprise.  They work really, really hard for 9 months of the year and deserve their three months off!

[pingpong]

Bielsa might be available now? If tonda gets suspended I'd love to see him come here and see if the media pivots - we'd have Tonda on suspension who is evil incarnate because spy, and we'd have bielsa managing the team who is a lovable rogue because spy.

[Holmes_and_Watson]

6 hours ago, pingpong said:

Bielsa might be available now? If tonda gets suspended I'd love to see him come here and see if the media pivots - we'd have Tonda on suspension who is evil incarnate because spy, and we'd have bielsa managing the team who is a lovable rogue because spy.

He's been very much in form with the press as Uruguay coach. Oh, and looking at the floor for the photoshoots.

[Doctoroncall]

7 hours ago, pingpong said:

Bielsa might be available now? If tonda gets suspended I'd love to see him come here and see if the media pivots - we'd have Tonda on suspension who is evil incarnate because spy, and we'd have bielsa managing the team who is a lovable rogue because spy.

He’s parted ways with Uruguay now the team hasn’t qualified for the knockout stage. 

[Dr Who?]

Great read…. Much better than the England game. 

Crime & Punishment by Tom Williams - When Saturday Comes. 

On May 20th, Southampton, lost their appeal against being thrown out of the Championship play-off final for illegally spying on a Middlesbrough training session a couple of days before the first leg of the play-off semi-final between the two teams. The club have been denied the opportunity to compete in "the richest game in football" (a horribly vulgar tag, and of a piece with much of the coverage of professional men's football in England) and hobbled ahead of another attempt at promotion next season through being docked four points. The sanction - particularly in the context of the crimes and punishments of other English clubs over the last 15 years - must be among the most draconian meted out, especially relative to the offence. When Marcelo Bielsa admitted to having spied on every opponent his Leeds United team had faced in 2018-19, Leeds were fined £200,000, an amount which seemed to reflect how seriously the transgression was taken. It was seen as poor form and a bit cheeky. It led though to a rule being introduced specifically to legislate against spying. It is typical of the various bodies who administer English football that the punishment for spying was not clear. EFL Regulation 127 stipulates that the punishment for observing another club's training session could be more or less anything. 

Given that the whole point of rules like this should be to dissuade people from breaking them, you'd think the EFL might make it a bit more obvious that espionage is punished with a sporting penalty, but there can be little doubt that everyone knows the score now. 

Chelsea's years of illegal payments- during which they won eight major domestic trophies - cost them just £10 million. Manchester City's 115 charges, announced by the Premier League in February 2023, seem more like a spectre that swirls around them than a set of alleged crimes for which they might eventually be punished. Practices like changing the dimensions of the playing area, mowing or not mowing, watering or not watering the grass and moving advertising hoardings to interfere with throw-ins are probably as or more impactful than spying. It's just that all of this stuff is either within the rules or is just tacitly accepted. It is hard to avoid the sense that throwing the book at Saints is a pious performance of moral seriousness in response to the authorities' toothlessness in other cases.

Nonetheless, Southampton, and in particular their manager Tonda Eckert, have behaved in a way that is classless, snide, and above all embarrassing. "The most embarrassing week in our 141-year history," some have said. Southampton CEO Phil Parsons has apologised, and the club have vowed to "respond with humility, accountability and determination to put things right". Given

that Parsons this season brought back repeatedly disgraced club legend and conspiracy theorist Matt Le Tissier to advise on football matters, it seems unlikely that this will be the last public relations disaster on his watch.

Eckert, meanwhile, has done something much worse than the spying itself. The young and clearly ambitious German coach bullied junior staffers into carrying out the grubby reconnaissance missions (Eckert has admitted to having had Ipswich and Oxford watched as well), leading to performance analysis intern Will Salt's young career acquiring a taint that will be hard to expunge. Salt has now been given a full-time, permanent contract by the club, but the photograph of him doing Eckert's bidding on a golf course next to Middlesbrough's training ground will be plastered across football media for weeks to come.

The unscrupulousness, slyness and ineptitude of Eckert and his staff have cost the club its chance of returning to the Premier League and set fire to thousands of pounds of loyal supporters' cash. I say ineptitude because the attempts at covert surveillance prior to games against Ipswich and Oxford as well as Boro yielded just one point, and as such were about as effective as Brighton's alleged attempt to gain a sporting advantage by leaving excrement on the floor of the away changing room prior to a play-off semi-final against Crystal Palace.

Eckert eventually recorded a typically robotic, eight-minute long, straight-to-camera video in which he apologised with unblinking eyes to fans, players and opponents. This was never going to be enough for a football media whose coverage of this melodrama has been embarrassing in itself. Reporters who have praised Newcastle United's ownership have clutched their pearls and carried on as if a bloke hiding behind a tree with a phone determined the outcome of 210 minutes of football. There is a sense that on some level, conscious of the moral cowardice on City, Newcastle and Chelsea, football writers have scented an opportunity to present themselves as principled and virtuous.

After Southampton owner Dragan Solak asserted that he didn't want to sack Eckert and felt the sanctions imposed on the club were excessive, the press responded as if they were discussing mass doping or match-fixing. On X, Henry Winter made the patently absurd claim that the issue of whether to ban Eckert is "almost an existential" challenge to the FA, an organisation that deemed the murderous Saudi regime to be fit and proper persons for owning a Premier League football club. The Times strongly implied that Eckert's father was a German spy.

The EFL have allowed two sets of supporters to spend their money on attending two games of football that ended up not counting - and actually increased Southampton's Wembley ticket allocation hours before fans found out that Saints wouldn't be playing. While match tickets have been refunded, other costly outlays for the thousands who planned to attend - train fares, hotels, flights, parking, babysitters- will not have been.

Middlesbrough's highly effective, ruthless comms campaign to get themselves a bye to the final - having ultimately suffered no detriment - added another layer of tawdriness to the whole unedifying saga. Boro promptly lost the final to a Hull City team who were there on merit and are the only party to emerge from the events of the last few weeks with their dignity intact.

 

Saints, on the other hand, now have a tattered reputation to add to the ignominy of two relegations in three seasons. Even the team's impressive FA Cup run, which saw them knock Arsenal out to reach the semi-final, now has an asterisk next to it. The fans dressing up as trees and singing "We are Southampton, we spy when we want" are fairly typical of football fandom now, with fans actively encouraging gamesmanship and celebrating players who taunt opposition players and supporters. Disgraced, debased and betraying those for whom football is not mere entertainment but a way of life, Southampton have come to mirror the game itself.

 

Edited 22 hours ago by Dr Who?

[hypochondriac]

22 minutes ago, Dr Who? said:

Great read…. Much better than the England game. 

Crime & Punishment by Tom Williams - When Saturday Comes. 

On May 20th, Southampton, lost their appeal against being thrown out of the Championship play-off final for illegally spying on a Middlesbrough training session a couple of days before the first leg of the play-off semi-final between the two teams. The club have been denied the opportunity to compete in "the richest game in football" (a horribly vulgar tag, and of a piece with much of the coverage of professional men's football in England) and hobbled ahead of another attempt at promotion next season through being docked four points. The sanction - particularly in the context of the crimes and punishments of other English clubs over the last 15 years - must be among the most draconian meted out, especially relative to the offence. When Marcelo Bielsa admitted to having spied on every opponent his Leeds United team had faced in 2018-19, Leeds were fined £200,000, an amount which seemed to reflect how seriously the transgression was taken. It was seen as poor form and a bit cheeky. It led though to a rule being introduced specifically to legislate against spying. It is typical of the various bodies who administer English football that the punishment for spying was not clear. EFL Regulation 127 stipulates that the punishment for observing another club's training session could be more or less anything. 

Given that the whole point of rules like this should be to dissuade people from breaking them, you'd think the EFL might make it a bit more obvious that espionage is punished with a sporting penalty, but there can be little doubt that everyone knows the score now. 

Chelsea's years of illegal payments- during which they won eight major domestic trophies - cost them just £10 million. Manchester City's 115 charges, announced by the Premier League in February 2023, seem more like a spectre that swirls around them than a set of alleged crimes for which they might eventually be punished. Practices like changing the dimensions of the playing area, mowing or not mowing, watering or not watering the grass and moving advertising hoardings to interfere with throw-ins are probably as or more impactful than spying. It's just that all of this stuff is either within the rules or is just tacitly accepted. It is hard to avoid the sense that throwing the book at Saints is a pious performance of moral seriousness in response to the authorities' toothlessness in other cases.

Nonetheless, Southampton, and in particular their manager Tonda Eckert, have behaved in a way that is classless, snide, and above all embarrassing. "The most embarrassing week in our 141-year history," some have said. Southampton CEO Phil Parsons has apologised, and the club have vowed to "respond with humility, accountability and determination to put things right". Given

that Parsons this season brought back repeatedly disgraced club legend and conspiracy theorist Matt Le Tissier to advise on football matters, it seems unlikely that this will be the last public relations disaster on his watch.

Eckert, meanwhile, has done something much worse than the spying itself. The young and clearly ambitious German coach bullied junior staffers into carrying out the grubby reconnaissance missions (Eckert has admitted to having had Ipswich and Oxford watched as well), leading to performance analysis intern Will Salt's young career acquiring a taint that will be hard to expunge. Salt has now been given a full-time, permanent contract by the club, but the photograph of him doing Eckert's bidding on a golf course next to Middlesbrough's training ground will be plastered across football media for weeks to come.

The unscrupulousness, slyness and ineptitude of Eckert and his staff have cost the club its chance of returning to the Premier League and set fire to thousands of pounds of loyal supporters' cash. I say ineptitude because the attempts at covert surveillance prior to games against Ipswich and Oxford as well as Boro yielded just one point, and as such were about as effective as Brighton's alleged attempt to gain a sporting advantage by leaving excrement on the floor of the away changing room prior to a play-off semi-final against Crystal Palace.

Eckert eventually recorded a typically robotic, eight-minute long, straight-to-camera video in which he apologised with unblinking eyes to fans, players and opponents. This was never going to be enough for a football media whose coverage of this melodrama has been embarrassing in itself. Reporters who have praised Newcastle United's ownership have clutched their pearls and carried on as if a bloke hiding behind a tree with a phone determined the outcome of 210 minutes of football. There is a sense that on some level, conscious of the moral cowardice on City, Newcastle and Chelsea, football writers have scented an opportunity to present themselves as principled and virtuous.

After Southampton owner Dragan Solak asserted that he didn't want to sack Eckert and felt the sanctions imposed on the club were excessive, the press responded as if they were discussing mass doping or match-fixing. On X, Henry Winter made the patently absurd claim that the issue of whether to ban Eckert is "almost an existential" challenge to the FA, an organisation that deemed the murderous Saudi regime to be fit and proper persons for owning a Premier League football club. The Times strongly implied that Eckert's father was a German spy.

The EFL have allowed two sets of supporters to spend their money on attending two games of football that ended up not counting - and actually increased Southampton's Wembley ticket allocation hours before fans found out that Saints wouldn't be playing. While match tickets have been refunded, other costly outlays for the thousands who planned to attend - train fares, hotels, flights, parking, babysitters- will not have been.

Middlesbrough's highly effective, ruthless comms campaign to get themselves a bye to the final - having ultimately suffered no detriment - added another layer of tawdriness to the whole unedifying saga. Boro promptly lost the final to a Hull City team who were there on merit and are the only party to emerge from the events of the last few weeks with their dignity intact.

 

Saints, on the other hand, now have a tattered reputation to add to the ignominy of two relegations in three seasons. Even the team's impressive FA Cup run, which saw them knock Arsenal out to reach the semi-final, now has an asterisk next to it. The fans dressing up as trees and singing "We are Southampton, we spy when we want" are fairly typical of football fandom now, with fans actively encouraging gamesmanship and celebrating players who taunt opposition players and supporters. Disgraced, debased and betraying those for whom football is not mere entertainment but a way of life, Southampton have come to mirror the game itself.

 

What a load of bollocks. Terrible article.

[Holmes_and_Watson]

29 minutes ago, Dr Who? said:

Great read…. Much better than the England game. 

Crime & Punishment by Tom Williams - When Saturday Comes. 

On May 20th, Southampton, lost their appeal against being thrown out of the Championship play-off final for illegally spying on a Middlesbrough training session a couple of days before the first leg of the play-off semi-final between the two teams. The club have been denied the opportunity to compete in "the richest game in football" (a horribly vulgar tag, and of a piece with much of the coverage of professional men's football in England) and hobbled ahead of another attempt at promotion next season through being docked four points. The sanction - particularly in the context of the crimes and punishments of other English clubs over the last 15 years - must be among the most draconian meted out, especially relative to the offence. When Marcelo Bielsa admitted to having spied on every opponent his Leeds United team had faced in 2018-19, Leeds were fined £200,000, an amount which seemed to reflect how seriously the transgression was taken. It was seen as poor form and a bit cheeky. It led though to a rule being introduced specifically to legislate against spying. It is typical of the various bodies who administer English football that the punishment for spying was not clear. EFL Regulation 127 stipulates that the punishment for observing another club's training session could be more or less anything. 

Given that the whole point of rules like this should be to dissuade people from breaking them, you'd think the EFL might make it a bit more obvious that espionage is punished with a sporting penalty, but there can be little doubt that everyone knows the score now. 

Chelsea's years of illegal payments- during which they won eight major domestic trophies - cost them just £10 million. Manchester City's 115 charges, announced by the Premier League in February 2023, seem more like a spectre that swirls around them than a set of alleged crimes for which they might eventually be punished. Practices like changing the dimensions of the playing area, mowing or not mowing, watering or not watering the grass and moving advertising hoardings to interfere with throw-ins are probably as or more impactful than spying. It's just that all of this stuff is either within the rules or is just tacitly accepted. It is hard to avoid the sense that throwing the book at Saints is a pious performance of moral seriousness in response to the authorities' toothlessness in other cases.

Nonetheless, Southampton, and in particular their manager Tonda Eckert, have behaved in a way that is classless, snide, and above all embarrassing. "The most embarrassing week in our 141-year history," some have said. Southampton CEO Phil Parsons has apologised, and the club have vowed to "respond with humility, accountability and determination to put things right". Given

that Parsons this season brought back repeatedly disgraced club legend and conspiracy theorist Matt Le Tissier to advise on football matters, it seems unlikely that this will be the last public relations disaster on his watch.

Eckert, meanwhile, has done something much worse than the spying itself. The young and clearly ambitious German coach bullied junior staffers into carrying out the grubby reconnaissance missions (Eckert has admitted to having had Ipswich and Oxford watched as well), leading to performance analysis intern Will Salt's young career acquiring a taint that will be hard to expunge. Salt has now been given a full-time, permanent contract by the club, but the photograph of him doing Eckert's bidding on a golf course next to Middlesbrough's training ground will be plastered across football media for weeks to come.

The unscrupulousness, slyness and ineptitude of Eckert and his staff have cost the club its chance of returning to the Premier League and set fire to thousands of pounds of loyal supporters' cash. I say ineptitude because the attempts at covert surveillance prior to games against Ipswich and Oxford as well as Boro yielded just one point, and as such were about as effective as Brighton's alleged attempt to gain a sporting advantage by leaving excrement on the floor of the away changing room prior to a play-off semi-final against Crystal Palace.

Eckert eventually recorded a typically robotic, eight-minute long, straight-to-camera video in which he apologised with unblinking eyes to fans, players and opponents. This was never going to be enough for a football media whose coverage of this melodrama has been embarrassing in itself. Reporters who have praised Newcastle United's ownership have clutched their pearls and carried on as if a bloke hiding behind a tree with a phone determined the outcome of 210 minutes of football. There is a sense that on some level, conscious of the moral cowardice on City, Newcastle and Chelsea, football writers have scented an opportunity to present themselves as principled and virtuous.

After Southampton owner Dragan Solak asserted that he didn't want to sack Eckert and felt the sanctions imposed on the club were excessive, the press responded as if they were discussing mass doping or match-fixing. On X, Henry Winter made the patently absurd claim that the issue of whether to ban Eckert is "almost an existential" challenge to the FA, an organisation that deemed the murderous Saudi regime to be fit and proper persons for owning a Premier League football club. The Times strongly implied that Eckert's father was a German spy.

The EFL have allowed two sets of supporters to spend their money on attending two games of football that ended up not counting - and actually increased Southampton's Wembley ticket allocation hours before fans found out that Saints wouldn't be playing. While match tickets have been refunded, other costly outlays for the thousands who planned to attend - train fares, hotels, flights, parking, babysitters- will not have been.

Middlesbrough's highly effective, ruthless comms campaign to get themselves a bye to the final - having ultimately suffered no detriment - added another layer of tawdriness to the whole unedifying saga. Boro promptly lost the final to a Hull City team who were there on merit and are the only party to emerge from the events of the last few weeks with their dignity intact.

 

Saints, on the other hand, now have a tattered reputation to add to the ignominy of two relegations in three seasons. Even the team's impressive FA Cup run, which saw them knock Arsenal out to reach the semi-final, now has an asterisk next to it. The fans dressing up as trees and singing "We are Southampton, we spy when we want" are fairly typical of football fandom now, with fans actively encouraging gamesmanship and celebrating players who taunt opposition players and supporters. Disgraced, debased and betraying those for whom football is not mere entertainment but a way of life, Southampton have come to mirror the game itself.

 

Well, I'm not reading that, as I bought it just for that article. 🙂

Hypo's comment indicates I've wasted my pennies. Not for the first time on WSC.