Saints expelled from Play Offs by EFL

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Saintmagic said:
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
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Yeah I agree which was my initial point- we're back to how long clubs keep CCTV.
 
Libby said:
I highly doubt it'd be a huge amount of games. If Taylor had that evidence he'd surely have already provided it in which case we're back to the issue of how long clubs keep CCTV.
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I would guess if would only apply since Eckert was employed and not be applicable where clubs had CCTV in place. Not sure how much this would whittle the likely cases of spying down to but would have to assume that it was not feasible for a proportion of the teams we had to play after this date.
 
Puck said:
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.
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I'd have to read it again but I'm sure they were already investigating those 2 games as part of evidence provided by Boro (which surely means whistleblower) - we didn't just outright fess up to those 2 for no reason.

In fact I'm pretty sure it said Boro had evidence of the Oxford one on the 7th which was the same day they caught Salt up there.
 
Libby said:
Yeah I agree which was my initial point- we're back to how long clubs keep CCTV.
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There is no need to delete as the footage will also be stored in a file and not masses of video tape. Should be easier to check too - which makes me think that there is nothing out there which woud implicate us. Theoretically could have been checked now as we are only talking about 72 hrs before the match,
 
Ian Thumwood said:
I would guess if would only apply since Eckert was employed and not be applicable where clubs had CCTV in place. Not sure how much this would whittle the likely cases of spying down to but would have to assume that it was not feasible for a proportion of the teams we had to play after this date.
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What I mean by CCTV is how else would be evidence and I highly doubt most clubs keep it tor 4 months.
 
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Libby said:
What I mean by CCTV is how else would be evidence and I highly doubt most clubs keep it tor 4 months.
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That is nonsense. You are just sticking the files in a computer. You are suggesting someone deletes all this stuff. In the last few companies I have worked at, the files just go into an archive folder. I am sure the CCTV coverage exists....it is just that there is nothing on it. People will not bother to delete. Too lazy.
 
Ian Thumwood said:
That is nonsense. You are just sticking the files in a computer. You are suggesting someone deletes all this stuff. In the last few companies I have worked at, the files just go into an archive folder. I am sure the CCTV coverage exists....it is just that there is nothing on it. People will not bother to delete. Too lazy.
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What so football clubs from training grounds keep it forever? Of course not, it'll be routinely deleted automatically at a set period.
 
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Ian Thumwood said:
Why?

it cost nothing to store.
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Depending on the quality of the footage it can cost a lot of memory to store.

I've worked at places where it's on a constant one week cycle so you could never go further than a week back.

You only keep it for as long as you think you'll need it. There's also GDPR considerations.
 
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tomw24 said:
Ay 3pm I was feeling flat, I won't lie. That has proper cheered me up. Championship is going to be better than the PL next season anyway.
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Just need to find a complete coaching team, half a team of players and half the exec team. The summers going to busy
 
In fairness.. we actually don’t know it saints has kept their WhatsApp messages. Even when they’re set to “delete within 10 mins of read” or whatever, if someone felt uncomfortable they might’ve screenshotted them at the time just in case. As I’m sub con / self employed, I’ve done this countless times to make sure I’m paid on time when employers conveniently have self delete messages set & tell me rates and date of pay when I’m fulfilling a contract for them.

Also, a month is pretty standard GDPR rules to keep data (specifically CCTV). However, there is no rule on it. It might’ve been stored on a cloud based backup by some companies. When I worked at a university full time, in maintainence there, it was our job to handle recording and storage of CCTV. We used to store it all on a cloud backup online for a year & it would self delete after year has lapsed
 
Saintmagic said:
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.
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Ok so we apparently had our points penalty reduced because we owned upto spying at Ipswich and Oxford. Surely if we are proven to have spied at other grounds the EFL will say why didn’t you own upto the others? They will surely reinstate the -2 so that will -3 for every occurrence and maybe more for not being honest
 
AshbySaint said:
Ok so we apparently had our points penalty reduced because we owned upto spying at Ipswich and Oxford. Surely if we are proven to have spied at other grounds the EFL will say why didn’t you own upto the others? They will surely reinstate the -2 so that will -3 for every occurrence and maybe more for not being honest
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No they won't reopen that one.
 
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