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In corporate espionage as in football, timing is everything.
In the second half of May, the sites of English professional football are as quiet as they ever are going to be. Except for the Premier League, the regular season is over, and players and coaching staff (the local, third tier club Burton Albion regularly use the place) have scattered, for their few weeks of holiday each year before the grind resumes, in pre-season training. At St Georgeโs Park, the England football centre in east Staffordshire, plenty of cars are in the car parks and two of the numerous training pitches are in use. Parked is a minibus with the name Stratford Town FC on the side.
On my visit on Thursday afternoon, May 21, the gate barriers were up, and the tinted glass of the gatehouse gives no clues to who if anyone is inside. I sat with a Starbucks coffee on the first floor of its Hilton Hotel after a light lunch (the main restaurant was not open because of a โprivate functionโ). I could look over my shoulder at the reception where in a few days England menโs team manager Thomas Tuchel and his chosen squad will check in, for training before they fly to North America for the 2026 World Cup.
Partly the Hilton was near empty because apart from football, that part of the Midlands has little market for a high class hotel. If you want a spa day you might prefer the more stately Hoar Cross Hall nearby; if you have a family, Alton Towers is irresistible. In security terms, such eerie quiet has merits; by contrast, a crowd allows hostiles to blend in. Yet just as a crowd in a movie always seems to include a nun, so a large site like St Georgeโs Park always seems to have a contractor at work, behind temporary fencing, such as fitting paving slabs. One of the classic ways for a penetration tester to physically try to breach site security is to pretend to be a workman.
On appearances, while St Georgeโs Park has overt CCTV, itโs an open site. Understandable; the Hilton is a working hotel that wants trade through the door, while the main training building is, though separate, a minuteโs walk away. As for Alton Towers, it would be impractical to build a perimeter too high to scale, and would look too fortress-like; though Alton Towers does have to combat those who try to get in without paying.
Southampton case
That the English Football League (EFL) threw Southampton FC out of their play-off final against Hull, denying them the chance of a ยฃ200m season in the Premier League, because they were caught โobservingโ Middlesbrough FCโs training ground before a play-off semi-final, was a glimpse of espionage in professional sport. There appeared little to stop a nation spying on St Georgeโs Park. Most clubsโ stadiums are urban, and have perimeters high enough to prevent outsiders having a free view of the field of play, and only recently saw the first prosecutions for tail-gating into Wembley, a law made because of the scandal of mass gate-crashing by England fans of the Euro championships final in 2021. By contrast the trespassing spy could install themselves overlooking St Georgeโs Park in woodlands, albeit at the risk of disturbing the geese in the meadow below.
A detail of the EFL regulation that did for Southampton is all-important; prohibiting the โobservingโ of a clubโs training within 72 hours of a match against that club. That implies a club could spy on them otherwise; though a club might fall foul of the catch-all requirement to behave โwith the utmost good faithโ. The 72 hours reflects the reality of the sheer grind of the football calendar; clubs are preparing for a Saturday fixture in the weekdays before, after recovering from the previous weekend. As players routinely become absent injured or return to training, any earlier spying may be wasted, or even prove misleading.
Why then might other nations due to face England in the 2026 summer tournament bother to spy on St Georgeโs Park? A spy would view formations, drills; yet they might only apply to the friendly matches, before the tournament proper. Those friendlies, like so much, are televised. The football spy โ or to rephrase that, the โscoutโ, a long-recognised role, of hunting for likely signings – has so much data to go by, whether paid for databases or footage on YouTube. The companies carrying out the most sophisticated intelligence gathering such as Neon Century will tell you about how the most wonderful and esoteric, freely available โsignalsโ give clues to what businesses and nations are planning (and not), even well in advance.
Short of war
Sport is not warfare, though both have their rules that are proverbially made to be broken. Neighbouring St Georgeโs Park is an airfield; light aircraft coming in to land are a common sight and sound. The pill-box that you could once see from the road leading to the Hilton has gone, whether knocked down or covered by vegetation. It was built in around 1941 on the perimeter of RAF Tatenhill, that in the 1939-45 war (pictured) was a training airfield, when the defences were in case of German paratroopers. Such physically violent threats are in the past. Besides, industrial espionage is about more than taking photos with long lenses, or using drones for surveillance; or aiming listening devices at windows to capture vibrations off the glass or other objects, to capture voices.
Humint
โSecurity is about people,โ the old security consultant said to me over Starbucks coffee. โHumintโ, short for human intelligence, is gathered as simply as by conversations โ albeit with the right persons, and knowing what to ask about and deriving insight. Journalists following footballers or business or political leaders more or less constantly may collect snippets that they are unable (for legal or practical reasons) to insert into the news; so might cleaners, close protection officers, waitresses. The most useful football โintelโ might not be whether a team will play 4-4-2 or 4-3-3, but whether two best players fell out over a woman, or had a drunken fight, or one is in financial difficulties because of a gambling addiction โ to name only obvious temptations faced by any young men (or women), in any group. That intel could be released most devastatingly not to the world in a press conference โ which would only raise questions about how the speaker came by the intel – but in a playerโs ear during the 90 minutes. If a global sporting competition is important enough to allow any methods, however unethical, to give a team an advantage, the gain from spying need not be on the training ground but in the hotel bedroom.
Photo courtesy of the Australian War Memorial.
