An Interesting Moral Conundrum?

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Would you rather that...

  • Will Salt got caught spying by Boro and therefore killing promotion hopes but stopping the practice?

    Votes: 1 6.7%

  • No spygate and winning promotion to the EPL where it is not illegal but still morally cheating?

    Votes: 14 93.3%
  • Total voters
    15
Libby said:
Thing is we didn't help ourselves by lying at the outset and then having to sheepishly backtrack and that's always going to be an aggravating factor.

While I do think it was on the harsh side the problem lies in the fact they clearly consider a sporting advantage to be worthy of a sporting sanction.

When the game in question is a knockout one and not a league game what other sporting sanction is there?

Re your other point around the morality of it, I'm much more annoyed that we did it in such an amateur fashion than the fact we did it.

I am pissed off about the Eastleigh thing though as that could feasibly cost them income.
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Yep I agree mate, however the seeming lack of legal advice or poor advice meant we offered up everything at the first time.

I wonder if that was Parsons thinking he was billy big bollocks and royally ****ing it up.

And yep the way we spied smacked of arrogance. But this seems a little odd and somewhat orchestrated to me. Why the **** would some guy stand in full sight hardly trying to hide behind a tree. That seems like he wanted to be seen. Not saying it was set up with Boro but it does seem out of kilter to be very obvious and visible when we went to lengths to get Eastleigh tracksuits previously.
 
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SR get out of my club said:
Yep I agree mate, however the seeming lack of legal advice or poor advice meant we offered up everything at the first time.

I wonder if that was Parsons thinking he was billy big bollocks and royally ****ing it up.

And yep the way we spied smacked of arrogance. But this seems a little odd and somewhat orchestrated to me. Why the **** would some guy stand in full sight hardly trying to hide behind a tree. That seems like he wanted to be seen. Not saying it was set up with Boro but it does seem out of kilter to be very obvious and visible when we went to lengths to get Eastleigh tracksuits previously.
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Re Parsons I make you absolutely correct there. Clearly didn't grasp how seriously the EFL was taking it. I know we didn't either but it's one thing for the fans to and a whole other for the CEO. Massively incompetent.

I too wonder if he wanted to be seen, if he was really being put under huge pressure after refusing the Ipswich game he might have seen it as his only 'way out' (for lack of a better term).
 
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thereisonlyoneno7 said:
As I have said before, I think Boro were looking for him after a tip off from the whistleblower. Salt probably knew he would get seen, and he purposely got a coffee. You wouldn’t get someone to dress up in Eastleigh gear one week and the next week stand in plain sight with an iPhone.
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An interesting issue: If Will Salt had simply stood next to the tree, WITHOUT his iphone, would he have been spying? Would anyone else, watching footballers train, less than 72 hours before any match, be considered to be spying? In other words, is the issue that a Saints employee was present, or that he was taking pictures/video?
I suspect that any/every team who train in locations open to the public (so not behind 15ft walls) could be watched, by anyone, so what, actually, constitutes spying?
 
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LincolnSaint said:
Some Saints fans on social media (not necessarily you) have been really weird about our reputation particularly around the views of opposing fans towards Southampton fc, I genuinely don't understand this train of thought. How does it benefit the club to be thought as nice/decent or even worse "a family club?"

I think our previous "good" reputation was because we're totally bland, unassuming and have sold our academy talent to other clubs for **** all, we roll over every time a big club clicks it fingers. More importantly we never win anything, so there's no hard feelings there, and the club is no threat to anyone in terms of poaching players. We roll out the red carpet to away fans and they generally feel happy going home with 3 points.

Players won't give a ****, they're after success and winning not giving 2 ****s what Colin the Watford fan thinks of their employer.

I could definitely cope with being hated but winning stuff.
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I think people who worry about what the opposing fans are going to say don't really understand the mentality of supporters.

Fans of other teams will go with whatever gives them the most value. The HYS on the BBC was a good example.
First it was all about us being the cheats.
Then when they finished with us they started on Boro for trying to weasel into the final. After they lost, they didn't deserve to be there anyway.
Even Hull got some crap about easy pickings for (insert name) my team next season. Down by Xmas etc all the usual stuff.

Some of the Boro fans didn't understand what was going on because they thought they were on the right side of events. But for fans of other teams it's not about right or wrong it's about sticking the knife in when you can. We will get it all next season not because they are all outraged but because they can. That's how it works.


LincolnSaint said:
I'd be happy to be sponsored by North Korea nuclear missile programme if it brought in more money mate. Moralising about this is pointless. Football sold it's soul a long long time ago so I'm past giving a ****, being nice/fair/moral has resulted in exactly one trophy in our entire history. None in my lifetime.

As for the academy, parents aren't going to give a **** otherwise Newcastle, City, and the rest wouldn't have one. It's more important to them that little Johnny earns his 35k a week, the head coach could be Putin and they'd still come if he picked their son.
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It always makes me laugh when football fans suddenly become experts (or even care) about the human rights in Saudi Arabia or the political shenanigans in the UAE when their rivals have owners from there.
 
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Lemons and Oranges said:
An interesting issue: If Will Salt had simply stood next to the tree, WITHOUT his iphone, would he have been spying? Would anyone else, watching footballers train, less than 72 hours before any match, be considered to be spying? In other words, is the issue that a Saints employee was present, or that he was taking pictures/video?
I suspect that any/every team who train in locations open to the public (so not behind 15ft walls) could be watched, by anyone, so what, actually, constitutes spying?
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Our employee being there constitutes a breach. The rule is observing (or attempting to) so getting images isn't required.
 
metalmonkey80 said:
The problem is it's all lumped into one and become an emotional tarball that sucks in as much of the drama as it can.

Looking at the sporting side:

We broke a set of EFL rules against Oxford in the league - got a sporting sanction of -2 points

We broke a set of EFL rules against Ipswich in the league - got a sporting sanction of -2 points

We broke a set of EFL rules against Boro in the playoffs - got a sporting sanction of losing that game and therefore out of the knock out rounds - the financial implications of the play offs are frankly irrelevant to the sanction decision despite the media and the EFL both making comments around it.

There is the implication that we've done the EFL rule breaking more often - no other club came calling with charges and in our "evidence" we didn't implicate ourselves on other games - benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise.

The FA are supposedly investigating but until they actually state what they are looking for I can't do anything other than speculate - ie how can the FA punish someone for something that is not a rule in all of their jurisdiction and also how could they possibly get it lifted up to UEFA when it's not a rule in their set either? Which means it will be some vague "game into disrepute" charge.

So we've been punished via sporting sanctions for our sporting regulation breaches. I put this into the category of pushing the bounds for sporting advantage and EVERY single sport has it in some way - is it right? No. Do I accept it on the premise that all sport is rife. Yes, but I'd like to see sport get cleaner but that comes with rules, sanctions and time.

On the accusations around coercion / bullying side that is an internal HR item for the club and it should be handled internally by the club and not dragged out in public but I don't like abusive people so if the right process deems it so then he should go.

I'm glad someone got caught on this rule and that the EFL has set a harsh sanction - it's only by making it too much a risk to do it will people stop doing it - but I also reserve the right to be pissed off it was us that got caught.

I don't condone cheating but the only way to have it stop happening (and I just saw a pig fly by the window) is the teach it out and punish transgressions fully.
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Yeah this seems to be the stance of people I’ve spoken to, and where I am at as well.

In a complete bubble the punishment is fair to me. -3 for each infringement in the league, reduced to -2 for cooperation. Then removed from a knockout competition for the infringement in the playoffs.

However it’s not in a bubble, and compared to other punishments what we got is much harsher than Leicester for example.

If this is the new norm for punishments from the EFL then fair enough. Obviously it’s typical that Saints get done by it first, but if it leads to harsher “sporting sanctions” for clubs breaking rules then fair enough. Time will tell on that though, and I have my doubts over if there will be harsher punishments and feel like we got done because of ****ing with Don Gibbo and his connections in the EFL.

Heads should still roll because of how we dealt with it more than anything. I think it’s perfectly possible that if we had taken the full allowed time to respond to the response and didn’t cooperate the EFL would have had little choice but to at least let us play the final and who knows what sort of defence we could’ve put in place if we’d lawyered up immediately, and what sanctions we could’ve avoided by that defence
 
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Words cannot express how much of a toss I couldn't give about our terrible crime tbh. Absolutely gutted at missing out on a trip to Wembley. Not sure how I feel about another season in the EFL, which is clearly run by fools.

The whole episode has been a carnival of crap, but I'm not feeling morally compromised in the slightest. Tonda's obsessive attention to detail is probably what makes him what he is; so he took it too far, big ****ing deal. No one died.
 
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