Southampton joins a list of sports teams to be punished for spying on rivals

Spying on its opponents has potentially cost English soccer club Southampton a place in the Premier League and around $270 million.

The team from England's southcoast was expelled Tuesday from the second-tier Championship playoff final after admitting to the unauthorized filming of other clubs’ practice sessions.

The playoff final is labelled the world’s richest one-off soccer match because a windfall of at least 200 million pounds ($270 million) in future Premier League earnings is on offer for the winning team.

It isn't the first example of espionage in the world of sports as teams look to gain an advantage over their rivals.

Here are some others:

New England Patriots sanctioned twice

The Patriots didn't learn their lesson.

In 2007, the Patriots were caught using video to record the New York Jets' signals during an NFL game. Coach Bill Belichick was fined $500,000, and the Patriots were fined $250,000 and docked a first-round draft pick.

Twelve years after that episode — widely known as Spygate — the team acknowledged that a video crew filmed the Cincinnati Bengals sideline during a game against Cleveland Browns, a week before the Bengals hosted the Patriots.

The Patriots were fined $1.1 million and had a third-round pick in the 2021 draft taken away.

Canada's drone spying scandal at the Olympics

Spying even got into the Olympics when Canada's defending champion women's team flew drones over New Zealand's closed practice sessions ahead of the teams' match that opened the Paris Games in 2024.

Canada coach Bev Priestman was suspended and removed from the team for the Olympics and two staff members were sent home.

FIFA weighed in, fining Canada Soccer $228,000 and docking the team six points at the Olympic tournament. Canada still advanced, before losing in the quarterfinals and suspending Priestman and the staffers for a year. The governing body accused Canada of "offensive behavior and violation of the principles of fair play.”

Baseball's 2017 champions were busted for stealing signs

The Houston Astros used more basic technology in a sign-stealing scandal that rocked Major League Baseball in 2020 — a camera, a TV monitor, and most famously, a trash can.

MLB's investigation that year found the Astros used a scheme during their 2017 World Series title run to steal signs relayed between opposing catchers and pitchers. A camera in center field zoomed in on the catcher and fed a monitor near Houston's dugout during home games. Teammates would study the catcher's signs on the monitor, then bang on a trash can to indicate to the batter if the next pitch would be a fastball or something offspeed.

Manager A.J. Hinch and general manager Jeff Luhnow were fired in the fallout, as was ex-Astros bench coach Alex Cora from his managerial job with the Boston Red Sox. Cora was later re-hired by Boston, and Hinch now manages in Detroit. No players were punished, and the Astros held onto their status as 2017 champions — although many fans view it with an asterisk.

The scandal sped up efforts by MLB to introduce technology to prevent other forms of sign-stealing, resulting in the PitchCom system approved for use in 2022. Now, catchers call pitches by pressing buttons on a remote control attached to a wristband or shin guard that sends audio signals to a device in the pitcher's hat.

McLaren gets $100M fine in F1 scandal

A 2007 spying scandal led to the McLaren Formula 1 team copping a $100 million fine.

As McLaren and Ferrari drivers battled for the title on the track that year, details emerged of McLaren staff having obtained confidential technical information about Ferrari’s car design.

One unlikely hero of the “Spygate” saga was a British copy shop manager who informed Ferrari when he spotted a customer, who turned out to be a McLaren engineer’s wife, making copies of the documents.

McLaren was eventually handed the vast fine and stripped of all its points in that year’s constructors’ championship. Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen won the drivers’ title when he beat McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso at the last race of the year.

Bielsa owns up after Leeds' season-long spying

News of Southampton's spying took soccer fans in England back to 2019, when Leeds — at the time managed by Argentine coaching great Marcelo Bielsa — was fined 200,000 pounds (then $259,000) for spying on one of Derby's training sessions ahead of a second-tier Championship game between the teams.

Bielsa accepted responsibility for having a club employee spy on Derby and, in a detailed, hour-long news conference, admitted to having watched at least one of each of his opponents’ training sessions throughout the season.

In handing out the fine, the English Football League said Leeds’ conduct “fell significantly short of the standards expected by the EFL and must not be repeated.”

Seven years later, Southampton did the same and got severely punished for it.

AP Sports Writer James Ellingworth contributed to this story.

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