Commentary: Canada’s rise in soccer suddenly looks suspicious amid Olympic spying scandal

PARIS — So now we know what fueled Canadian soccer’s rise from pretender to global contender. It wasn’t just grit, camaraderie and good coaching that got the country into the men’s World Cup for the first this century and earned its women’s team three straight trips to the Olympic medal stand.

There reportedly were drones involved as well.

Last week the women’s national team was caught spying on New Zealand in advance of the two countries Olympic opener and the damage that has done to Canadian soccer two years before the World Cup returns to North America could be devastating. The country’s soccer federation and FIFA have both launched investigations, with federation CEO Kevin Blue saying he fears cheating may have become a “long-term, deeply embedded systemic” part of the national team’s culture.

This all blew up last week when Joseph Lombardi, an analyst with the Canadian women’s team, was stopped by French police after he retrieved a drone that had been flying over the New Zealand team’s training. Canada’s Olympic committee quickly moved to control the damage in the hope of keeping the scandal from growing larger.

It was a plan that failed miserably.

First it expelled Lombardi and assistant coach Jasmine Mander, who was aware of Lombardi’s activities, and backed coach Bev Priestman’s decision to sit out the New Zealand game as an act of contrition. But the more investigators and journalists, especially those at the Toronto Globe and Mail and TSN, began to pull at the loose threads of the story, the more it began to unravel.

Lombardi, it turned out, also flew drones over a second New Zealand practice. That led to the expulsion of Priestman, who at first was evasive about the accusations, dodging direct questions from reporters and telling the Canadian Olympic Committee that she was unaware of what her staff was doing.

Filming an opponent’s practice — especially a closed practiced — can be extremely helpful to a coaching staff because it can reveal formations, the likely starting lineup and who is taking the penalty kicks and set pieces. So FIFA, which manages the men’s and women’s tournaments in the Summer Games, got involved, suspending Priestman for a year, fining the team about $225,000 and deducting six points from Canada’s total in the group-stage table, severely hindering its chances of successfully defending the gold medal it won in Tokyo three years ago.

Priestman, just 38, has likely coached her final game for Canada.

But that’s just the punishment. Turns out the drone flights in France reportedly weren’t just isolated incidences, but rather a regular practice.

According to the Canadian sports network TSN, assistant coaches and contractors working with Canada’s men’s and women’s teams have for years been secretly filming the closed-door training sessions of opponents, including during the Tokyo Olympics and in men’s qualifying for the 2022 World Cup.

John Herdman, now the manager at Toronto FC, was the men’s coach when Canada won that CONCACAF qualifying tournament to advance to the World Cup for the first time in 36 years. Herdman had previously coached the women’s team, taking it from last in its group in the 2011 World Cup to the quarterfinals four years later and to bronze medals — Canada’s first Olympic medals in women’s soccer — in London and Rio de Janeiro.

An uncomfortable Herdman called news of the spying “a surprise and a shock” and, like Priestman, repeatedly danced around direct questions before saying that “I’m highly confident in my time as a head coach at an Olympic Games or World Cup, we’ve never been involved in any of those activities.”

Which may be true but the answer seemed strangely precise — apparently with good reason. According to TSN, Canada, under Herdman, used a drone to record a U.S. training session before a 2019 game in Florida and two years later Honduras stopped a training session in Toronto after someone spotted a drone overhead ahead of a World Cup qualifier against Herdman’s team.

Priestman is a Herdman protegee, having played and learned under him as a 12-year-old in England, then following him to Canada as an assistant coach with the women’s team.

American Jesse Marsch took over the Canadian men’s team in May and federation CEO Blue said the coach told him that he denounced the use of drones to spy on competition.

Players, meanwhile, scrambled to defend their reputations.

“I want to be clear that having been a national team player for 23 years, we were never shown or discussed drone footage in team or individual meetings I’ve been present for,” Christine Sinclair, a three-time Olympic medalist and the all-time leading scorer, male or female, in international soccer history, wrote on Instagram. Sinclair, now retired from the national team, played for both Herdman and Priestman.

Blue seemed to back that, telling reporters that the players in France never saw any of the video taken by Lombardi. But sources told TSN the practice of filming opponents’ training sessions was an open secret among the staff, which justified it based in the false belief that other teams were doing it as well.

In fact, the practice was so prevalent and accepted in Canada, when contractors refused to take part, they were replaced, TSN said.

That reporting will make it difficult to pin the blame solely on the two head coaches since, as Blue suggested, the cheating seems to have been systemic. So expect more penalties — and revelations — to be announced as the FIFA and Canada Soccer investigations continue, although the size and depth of those penalties could be limited since Canada has already invested heavily in preparations to stage 13 World Cup games in 2026.

In the meantime, expect Canada to keep its drones grounded.