If new evidence about different games came into light it'd be new charges not a reopening.
Saints expelled from Play Offs by EFL
- Thread starter tomw24
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Such a joke. We’ve already been ****ed, clubs need to just give it a rest for the fans sake if any!
They won’t care if they can eliminate a parachute payment club from promotion contention next year. By my count there will only be the 3 relegated sides and us with parachute payments next season, so all the other clubs in the Champ this season should be doing all they can to jump in on us and make us have as hard a season as possible.
If you're, say, Sheff Utd, or Birmingham, or Norwich (just examples), you might not have been too fussed a week ago. You might even have purposely been keeping quiet, if you thought you'd rather see Saints promoted (and hence removed as a promotion threat next season) than Hull. But now, you're far more likely to come forward. And I wouldn't blame a single one of them.
Yeah that’s a good point. If any other clubs had evidence a week ago, it didn’t really beneifit them in any way to put it forward. It absolutely does now if the request is the EFL does a - point for each instance. As Tonda joined in November I assume we played every team at least once, and probably what like 30 games in total? A nice round -50 sounds plausible.
My one thought was whether Gibson might have held some info back in the event that the ruling had gone our way, aiming to further muddy the waters and create more issues. Which does sound like something he’d be savvy enough to do
Possibly yeah, but I doubt the EFL would be very impressed with that. Not that he'd necessarily but it's a risky way to do things for someone who likes to present his club as doing things the right way.
Be interesting though to see if they were to have a 'max out' number.
Guess we'll find out in coming weeks anyway.
When did he leave the club? Not sure how easy it is to deny as well. If it’s just his word against ours and we don’t happily come out and admit it like we did with Ipswich and Oxford then there would need to be concrete evidence. But we also have the weak position of having done it 3 times and nobody is buying those were the only instances, concrete evidence or not.
I believe we said we only did it to Oxford because of the manager change and Ipswich because they were just down the road, so maybe we could argue that those circumstances weren’t present in any of the other games so we didn’t feel the need to go have a quick spy.
It also sounds like Salt was very cooperative and sharing his phone/whatsapp. He sounded like the go to guy for this so if we have done it more than those times then he probably has it all on his phone and will probably happily share it with the EFL if it helps him clear his name to some degree. He’s probably done in football anyway so doesn’t need to worry about other clubs looking at him unfavourably for snitching.
Keeps it interesting and I did think that Spygate was far from over for Saints after the appeal was rejected. Think it’s very possible we have a double digit point deduction next season, which will make this summer more interesting with players coming and going.
I think that's very unlikely for a few reasons:
1. If the decision hadn't gone the way Boro wanted then they weren't able to appeal anyway. I'm sure Gibson would rather get promoted than spend more on legal fees chasing an uncertain result so it would have been in his interests to throw everything at us first time around.
2. It's harder to overturn a decision than it is to win in the first place. Generally to appeal successfully you either have to show the person making the decision made a serious error or that their findings or interpretations of the facts were so wrong that no reasonable person could hold the view that they did. So it's not enough to convince an appeal judge/panel that you should have been given a less harsh penalty. You have to convince them the penalty you were given was SO harsh that no reasonable person could think it should apply, which is very difficult and why most appeals fail.
3. On presenting more evidence, I don't know about these hearings specifically but in general holding things back isn't worth doing in legal proceedings. In an appeal you're usually only allowed to present new evidence that you didn't or couldn't have known about before the first hearing. If you knew about (or even should have known about) something before and didn't bring it up then in general that's your problem not the court's.
Think it’s more likely other clubs did their own digging and, if they found anything (which it sounds like they might have), didn’t give it to Boro and held onto it to use in the event we didn’t go up. I think every other club in the league would’ve rather we went up than Hull from a next season viewpoint so were happy to sit and wait to see if we got out of the league anyway.
Now they can use the evidence to send us out of the league, just with relegation instead
With any luck, we won't sing like a ****ing canary any more and burden falls on others proving it and not our ****e CEO embarrassing himself further.
Can't blame any club for trying to weaken us further though. Strike while the irons hot and all that.
WC starts in 3 weeks and media will move on.
Can't blame any club for trying to weaken us further though. Strike while the irons hot and all that.
WC starts in 3 weeks and media will move on.
Are we overstating the importance of this whistleblower? The written decision of the panel is pretty clear the only evidence presented relating to Oxford and Ipswich came from Saints. In brief:
Paragraph 2 says we were charged by the EFL with spying on Middlesbrough.
Paragraph 3 quotes the specific Regulations we breached.
Paragraph 4 says we admitted the charges and a hearing date was arranged.
Paragraph 5 says Boro asked to intervene and that request was denied.
Paragraph 6 says (this is a direct quote) "In the period between the First Notification of Charges and the hearing date the Respondent made reference to two other similar incidents of observing training sessions of other clubs in breach of the Regulations."
Paragraph 7 says we admitted those extra breaches but said we thought they were outside the scope of the original proceedings.
Paragraph 8 says the EFL then decided to bring extra charges and wanted to consolidate everything into the same hearing. We objected.
Paragraph 9 says the panel agreed to do what the EFL wanted. It also says "the EFL were not adducing any further evidence"
"The Respondent" referred to in paragraph 7 is Southampton Football Club. So it was us who told them about those incidents and the EFL didn't provide any further evidence in relation to those charges. Later in the decision we're criticised for the initial lie and there's a reference in paragraph 39 to the EFL having told us they were investigating "another incident" but, again, paragraph 9 says the EFL didn't put forward any evidence in relation to Oxford or Ipswich, presumably because they didn't have anything worth presenting to the panel.
That being the case I doubt there's any more evidence available on anyone's phone. We would have found it and, for a variety of reasons, I think we'd have passed it on. The Athletic have also reported more details of the messages on phones (Tonda not being happy about the quality of information gathered previously, the stuff about wearing Eastleigh kit, the doctored joke pictures of Salt) so the messages the panel saw clearly included a fair amount of detail and there can't have been anything else in there to suggest more spying.
I think it would be hard to prove there were more incidents. I doubt clubs keep CCTV evidence for that long, with GDPR you'd have to justify keeping it for an extended period and pay for storage and there's no obvious reason a football club would decide to keep security footage longer than any other business. CCTV also may not be good enough quality to identify an individual anyway and, depending on where their training grounds are, clubs just may not have that much CCTV coverage.
As you say, it's also plausible that there were things about these specific teams or matches that might have triggered spying. Ipswich was a key game and they were training at Eastleigh, which is probably unusual - they'd played away at West Brom on the Saturday and were at ours on the Tuesday so I guess they didn't go back to Ipswich in between. Boro and Oxford both train in or near places the general public have access to (the golf course for Boro while Oxford train somewhere with 5 or 6 a side pitches the public can rent out), Oxford had changed manager and Boro was another key game. A lot of other training grounds probably aren't as easy to access. I doubt you could just wander into Staplewood for example.
Regarding the post that said everyone hates us, the comments on the BBC hys after the game yesterday are interesting. A lot of posters had a real go at Boro for having 3 goes at promotion, about being too keen to go to court and generally being whingers. Jokes about Boro taking Hull to court for scoring so late in the game. A very sneaky move. Very few mentions of us as the baddies. Light at the end of the tunnel or another train coming?
I am surprised that no other clubs have come forward and also that this has not come to light with others teams too. If this is so widespread and "common place, " it is interesting that nothing has come to light.
I suppose further points deductions are feasible but I cannot see it happening. If we had been caught more than three times, we would have heard about it last week. I can see there being litigation between other clubs albeit the fact that Hull won yesterday has probably minimised the effect.
I think it was Libby who suggested that Hull would have beaten Saints. I am not convinced. I believed we would have won the final if not kicked out.
I suppose further points deductions are feasible but I cannot see it happening. If we had been caught more than three times, we would have heard about it last week. I can see there being litigation between other clubs albeit the fact that Hull won yesterday has probably minimised the effect.
I think it was Libby who suggested that Hull would have beaten Saints. I am not convinced. I believed we would have won the final if not kicked out.
I think that the situation in Scotland with Celtic has far more potential following the late hand ball and the next match being subject to a pitch invasion. If Fibson was the director of Hearts, I am sure he would think it would be worth a pop.
I think the “what about…” needs to stop. Regardless of what Boro have done and who the “bad guys” are now, it does not lessen any of what we did and how much of a monumental **** up it all was. We still cheated multiple times, lied about the cheating and bullied staff into it. We shouldn’t be let off lightly and if other clubs now want to pile on the pressure then fair play to them in all honesty if there is evidence backing the claim. The idea that we’ve been punished enough and other clubs should back off is laughable, we deserve no goodwill from any of this.
The only people that deserve goodwill and patience are the poor 11 sods that have to step out on to the pitch next August. Everyone else at the moment can grovel and **** off.
TRS
Where do you want to start?
Loss of revenue on merchandise for play-off final?
Costs associated with play off semi finals including travel, insurance, etc
Overtime costs for ticket office staff.
Premium on costs for coach hire a short notice.
I appreciate anything assocoated with training will be a non-starter as Boro admitted to instigating this off their own back.
All sorts of ways this could go hence why EFL will redefine the behaviour of clubs before next season.