Canadian men's team shown video of Honduran practice during World Cup qualifying, source says
Published
Seventeen players on Canada’s men’s national soccer team attended a briefing on Aug. 31, 2021, in a Toronto hotel ballroom and watched as head coach John Herdman played a video that showed the Honduran national team’s closed practice a day earlier, a source with first-hand knowledge of the meeting told TSN.
Canada would play Honduras in a World Cup qualifier on Sept. 2 (the teams tied 1-1) and an intense Herdman urged his players to study the screen closely, the source said.
Herdman explained that the Honduran team favoured a 4-4-2 formation with either a medium or a high press and that simplicity was the key to Canada being successful in the important game, the source said.
Herdman emphasized “turning the Honduran team around,” in the first 15 minutes, according to the source.
TSN has corroborated the source’s account of the meeting.
The source’s account comes after Herdman’s public statements earlier today. Herdman, who coached the women’s national team from 2011 to 2018 and the men’s from 2018 to 2023 and who now coaches at Toronto FC, told reporters this morning that he was confident his teams never spied on competitors, at least at the sport’s largest events.
“I’m highly confident in my time as a head coach at an Olympic Games or World Cup we’ve never been involved in any of those activities,” Herdman said this morning. He declined to comment otherwise, citing Canada Soccer’s impending independent review of what happened in Paris.
Canada Soccer has said it will commission an independent review of both national teams and that the review would explore historical ethical decision-making issues. The federation has said the review findings will be made public when they are completed. That process will likely take months.
But in the hours after TSN reported that the use of drones and spying has been a mainstay tactic of both the men’s and women’s national teams, more people connected to Canada Soccer have come forward to share their experiences with the federation’s secret spying program.
One former Canada Soccer employee said spying on opposing team practices has been a tactic used since at least 2016, when the women’s national Under-16 team played in a Concacaf tournament in Saint George, Grenada. At that tournament, staff discussed how a colleague had found a place to stay hidden and spy on opponent practices and also talked about how they needed to patrol the perimeter of their own training centre, the source said.
TSN also spoke on Thursday and today with two former Canada Soccer contractors who said they were asked by women’s national team coaches to film opposing team practices.
Both of the contractors requested anonymity because they still work in the soccer industry and are concerned about retribution.
One of the contractors said they worked with Canada Soccer as an analyst in Vancouver when they were a university student in 2017. The contractor said they were provided with a camcorder and directed by a Team Canada coach to find their way into a closed U.S. team practice and to record it.
“The coach told me, ‘We can’t go because if they catch us, we’ll be in trouble but you can go and if they catch you, you can just say you’re a student, like just a random person’,” the former contractor said. “So they gave me a camcorder, the kind a mom would take to record her kid’s game and sent me off, telling me to try to get some footage of their formations. I found a vantage point and filmed two U.S. practices but the footage that we acquired was so awful because I was like shaking the whole time, and you can hear me hyperventilating.”
“I was so deeply uncomfortable while I was on these missions and I was being told that if I really wanted to work in women's football, if I really wanted to have a career, that this was the kind of tough stuff that you have to do. I was so desperately trying to break into this mysterious and competitive industry and I didn’t think about what was right or wrong. I just wanted to impress these powerful people.”
The second contractor said they were a member of the women’s national team staff in February 2023 during the She Believes Cup, a tournament hosted by the U.S. in Orlando that featured the Americans, Brazil, Japan and Canada. The contractor said they were assigned twice to film an opposing team’s closed practice.
“One time the training got moved so I didn’t have to push back, and the second time, I just said no,” the contractor said. “The coach pushed back and said they really needed for me to do this and I just stood my ground and said no. Why would I take that risk and possibly ruin my career? To put up a drone, you need to register it under a name and an ID number. So it’s very easy for law enforcement around a big tournament to identify whose drone is whose.”
TSN was contacted on Friday by a source familiar with Canada Soccer’s arrangement to use the Edmonton Soccer Dome in November 2021.
At that time, Canada Soccer secured a lease to use the country’s largest indoor dome before the men’s national team’s World Cup qualifier games against Costa Rica and Mexico. When the federation insisted that the dome’s managers refuse access to the visiting teams, those managers agreed.
The Canadian team only trained on the dome field once.
“When the managers asked why that was, the Canadian team told them that they didn’t need to use the field, but they wanted to ensure that Mexico and Costa Rica trained outside, so the Canadians could watch them,” the source said.