‘Every team does it’: How World Cup sides thwart opponents’ spy efforts

When they first found it, the U.S. men’s national team loved everything about its FIFA World Cup training base.

Well, everything … except the giant balloon.

“The balloon is interesting,” a federation official mused last month, “but we really have to make sure that thing isn’t running while we’re actually practicing.”

The official wasn’t kidding. The team is headquartered at Great Park in Irvine, California, and the Great Park Balloon, which resembles a massive (and probably delicious) mandarin orange, floats visitors as high as 400 feet in the air. With clear sightlines for miles around, the view from its basket is incredible.

And therein lies the problem.

While spying in soccer might only sporadically pop onto the casual fan’s radar — like, say, when a top team gets caught using a drone to spy on its opponents during the Olympics, as happened with Canada in France two years ago — the idea that someone from the other team might be watching is a far more regular concern for many at the sport’s highest levels. Numerous conversations with players, coaches and backroom staff ahead of this summer’s World Cup affirmed that reality.

Put more simply: Soccer is full of people who are either (A) spying on someone; (B) actively worried that someone is spying on them; or (C) both.

It’s already come up during this tournament: Mexican authorities “neutralized” an unidentified drone flying over South Korea’s training session on June 16, and a few days later, U.S. coach Mauricio Pochettino made a joke about looking for unwelcome observers when he was spotted taking a video up high on a hill before training.

“We’re in the era of spies,” he said with a smile.

The list of high-profile past episodes is long and varied. As recently as a month ago, the English game was ablaze with discussion about Southampton being found guilty of spying on the training sessions of multiple opponents. A Swedish scout was busted using a telescope to spy on South Korea’s practices just ahead of their game in the 2018 World Cup. And when the soccer tournament at the 2024 Summer Games in Paris was derailed by Canada and its unwelcome drone over New Zealand’s practice, there was an initial bout of hand-wringing and “Can-you-believe-it?!” followed, very quickly, by a collective shrug of the shoulders.

“Listen, every team does it,” U.S. midfielder Tyler Adams said at the time on “The Cooligans” podcast. “I know for a fact every team does it in some capacity.”

Every team? A stretch perhaps, but Adams’ point is well taken. With 48 teams at this summer’s World Cup, it seems hard to imagine spying isn’t on everyone’s, ahem, radar.

And, given that reality, it’s not difficult to see why the U.S. wouldn’t necessarily love having a towering, open-to-the-public balloon ride being available right alongside its training sessions.

“Spying is a reality,” said one manager who has worked at the highest levels of both club and international soccer. “Marcelo may be one of the few who talks about it, but almost everyone I know has their own stories.”

“Marcelo,” in this case, refers to Marcelo Bielsa, the legendary Argentine coach who in 2019 openly admitted that his team, Leeds United, had spied on every opponent they faced that season. Bielsa even held a news conference in which he explained his reasoning — which included, among other gems, the oddly vulnerable revelation that not spying might make Bielsa feel like he wasn’t giving his best effort at winning.

“We feel guilty if we don’t work enough,” he said, adding that spying “allows us to have less anxiety and, in my case, I am stupid enough to allow this kind of behavior.” (Leeds were fined about $250,000 after Bielsa’s admission.)

Drones, obviously, are a modern option for spying, but various technologies have been used as reconnaissance tools for years. When the U.S. men’s national team plays World Cup qualifying matches on the road in Concacaf, part of their prematch practice protocol is to do a sweep of the stadium for cameras or other recording devices.

One former backroom staff member recalled numerous instances where hidden cameras were discovered, often in surprising places.

“In the Azteca [in Mexico City], we found GoPros on the ring around the top of the stadium,” the staffer said. “We’ve found them under the trainer’s bench. We found them one time near the spare goal” stationed at the edge of the field.

“Our approach was always just to keep them,” the staffer added. “We thought of it like a gift. Because it’s not like the other team is going to call you up, admit what they were doing and ask for them back, right?”

It is easy to understand why one might want to spy ahead of a high-stakes game like a World Cup match or the English Championship playoff that could lead to a lucrative Premier League promotion. But with some coaches and programs, the practice of spying is so embedded that it is attempted even for completely meaningless fixtures.

Multiple U.S. federation sources described (with laughter) an incident at a Florida training camp in 2021 when a staffer from Canada’s men’s team was caught trying to watch the American training session a day before the teams were set to play in a casual, unofficial scrimmage.

“Everyone was like, ‘Wait — what?'” one federation staffer at the time recalled. “It was a scrimmage. We would have told them our lineup, told them what we were going to play — literally told them anything they wanted, if they really wanted to know.”

Multiple coaches and players ascribed a cultural element to spying: For example, South or Central American teams and coaches, the cliché goes, expect spying to take place as a matter of course, while their North American and European counterparts are less likely to assume it’s constantly happening. (Opinions vary on how accurate these labels are.)

Everyone agrees, however, that paranoia knows no borders. Coaches of all nationalities, and at all levels, frequently have specific procedures for ensuring their practices are shielded from inquisitive eyes. Sweeps of the stadium during the typical day-before-a-match training session are universal, and demands for privacy can sometimes result in awkward moments if the facility’s electrical or landscape workers are also trying to complete important tasks.

“I had a lot of guys tell me, ‘Uh, my boss says I need to run these wires’ when I’d ask them to leave,” a former national team staffer said. “It could get weird.”

The staffer also added that one of his jobs was to go to every fixed camera in the stadium — the cameras used by the broadcasters and thus, not turned on the day before a game — and spin them around anyway, ensuring that their lenses faced up into the stands instead of down toward the field. “He just didn’t want to take a chance they somehow might be recording,” the staffer said.

If that seems over the top, consider another favorite tale shared often by U.S. federation staffers involving, again, Canada. In 2017, just before the countries’ women’s national teams faced each other in a friendly in San Jose, California, Canadian officials accused the Americans of trying to capture their session by installing cameras on the roof of the stadium. Look, the Canadian officials said, over and over, we can plainly seem them right there on the roof.

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The objects the Canadians were pointing out? A pair of plastic birds, permanently installed to shoo away pigeons.

Of course, in some instances, there is nothing anyone can do to allay a coach’s concern. Before a U.S.-Cuba World Cup qualifier in Havana in 2008, the Americans quickly realized that several Cuban players were watching their prematch session … because the players lived in apartments alongside the stadium.

Years later, before a tournament game in the U.S., an American coach angrily called over several staffers and pointed to a person sitting on the terrace of a high-rise building alongside the college field where the team was training. “We didn’t know what to do,” one staff member at the time said. “The building was, like, university housing and it was just some kid sitting on his balcony smoking.”

FIFA has promised that the security perimeters around each of this summer’s World Cup training sites will be robust, and the U.S. has notoriously strict drone operator regulations that make it challenging even for teams who want to use the devices to film their own sessions.

Given that, the overarching question about spying feels even more relevant: In the end, does it even matter? In a sport beloved for its free-flowing beauty, how much useful information could actually be gleaned from peeping in on any single training session?

After all, most tactical preferences a team might have are already known from watching its previous games. Same for its preferred lineup or how it likes to play from the back or handles pressure.

Sure, one might glimpse a preview of a unique set piece wrinkle or ascertain where a particular player might like to place his penalty kicks. But beyond that?

“That’s the thing,” a top-level coach said. “I’m not even sure most of what you’d see is even worth it.”