Was that really worth it?

It’s a question that might be top of mind for whichever Canada Soccer staff were in charge of the decision to fly a drone over New Zealand women’s soccer practices in the days before their opening match at the Paris Olympics.

To date, the ramifications of that choice — and, more importantly, of getting caught — include head coach Bev Priestman and a pair of assistants being removed from the team. One of those assistants, Joey Lombardi, received an eight-month suspended prison sentence in France for operating the drone.

And for what? The Canadians are reigning gold medallists, ranked eighth worldwide by FIFA; New Zealand, at 28th, sits last among all Olympic teams. Not to mention the risk of flying a drone at an Olympics which has spent $4 billion US in security, and where drones are banned to begin with.

“It’s a new depth of stupid, in my opinion, and incompetence to even do that,” said CBC Sports analyst and longtime national team player Amy Walsh. “And then the boring answer is that it’s completely unnecessary because if you have unwavering belief in the individuals that you’ve assembled to perform, then that’s who you should be focused on.”

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Canada went on to beat New Zealand 2-1 on Thursday despite surrendering the game’s first goal.

Analysis of the images captured by Lombardi, described by the Canadian Olympic Committee as a “non-accredited staffer,” reportedly showed New Zealand players applying instructions given by their coach.

Walsh, who retired in 2009, said Canada’s coaching staff might have been trying to get a sneak peek at New Zealand’s formation, possible injuries, set pieces and penalty-kick strategy.

Specifically, Walsh noted that understanding an opponent’s set-pieces like corner kicks can be advantageous when goals are often scored from standstill, while you can prepare tactically if you know the other side’s formation even if it’s something that reveals itself early in a match.

“Purely from a sporting perspective, [this could be] an attractive risk to the coach … And then you can train your team to play against that,” Walsh said. “I will say at the end of that, there’s no good reason to do this type of thing.”

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Drone usage prevalent

There is plenty of publicly available film anyone at home can ingest about the strategies international teams employ — and even more footage accessible to coaching staffs through subscription services and proprietary research.

Even still, drone usage remains prevalent in soccer. Canada Soccer CEO Kevin Blue said Friday the men’s team “attempted drone usage” at the recently completed Copa America. In 2021, Honduras stopped a training session ahead of a game against Canada after spotting a drone.

Ivory Coast soccer star Didier Drogba told CBC Sports’ Ariel Helwani that spying “doesn’t really affect the result of the game.”

“It affects some situations, I believe, of the game, but the end result, when you go down, you know what you’ve prepared, you know how to win, you know how to play,” he said. “And for me it’s, they just caught them, that’s it. It’s part of the game.”

Another consideration is the condensed nature of the worldwide soccer schedule, which limits the amount of time Canadian players have to train together.

The National Women’s Soccer League’s last matches before the Olympic break were played July 7, leaving a little over three weeks before Canada’s Olympic opener.

It’s a puzzle coaches from every country must piece together.

“Getting that group together and then managing different loads, when player X actually just played a match on Sunday and player Y is recovering from a little calf niggle or something like that. Or they’ve not been playing regularly and so then they should be maybe more intensely trained when they come into camp,” Walsh said. 

“They’re managing all of those moving pieces and they have a very short window of time in which to execute on their coaching and their tactics in the system that they want to play.”

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Players likely unaware

Those players — perhaps due to their overloaded schedules — must then focus their entire energy on kicking the ball around a field.

Walsh said players’ existence at the Olympics mostly consists of meetings and taking the bus to the pitch. It is all soccer, all the time.

“There’s comfort in controlling what your responsibilities are as a player, but then also knowing that everybody in the technical staff and the support staff, that they’re doing their job and their due diligence,” she said.

However you slice it, spying on opponents’ practices would always be considered cheating.

“If you’re so obsessed and paranoid about being spied on yourself or in knowing what the opponent is going to do and you don’t know that already based on all of the ethically sourced material that’s available to you, then to me that’s problematic,” Walsh said. 

“I think that your focus is not on the right things.”

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