Introduction

This is “What Just Happened?,” the podcast that looks at the biggest brand crises of our time, what they meant for organisational strategy and behaviour, and their lasting impact on our approach to crisis communication.

I’m Kate Hartley. And I’m Tamara Littleton. And together, we’ll delve into what happened, why it mattered, and whether it could happen again.

Episode 

Tamara Littleton: Welcome back to What Just Happened, and for the purposes of anyone listening on audio, I’m now doing a binoculars sign. What are we talking about today?

Kate Hartley: This is, this is.. oh, this is my favourite story, I think, of the last week or so. So, this is for Southampton Football Club, a story about Southampton Football Club and Spygate, and I’m not a massive football fan. You play football, though, right Tamara?

TL: Yeah, I used to play football. I didn’t necessarily have time to support anyone.

KH: Okay, I’m gonna judge you a little bit. So, I grew up in a family of Southampton or Saints supporters, so although I’m not a fan, and that may become horribly clear for the next few minutes, this is really interesting to me because my, you know, my brother’s a season ticket holder, and yeah, there was a lot of kind of Saints stuff around me. But this is a fascinating story, I think.

If you are interested in football, which is that Southampton Football Club were caught, or admitted to spying on their rivals just ahead of big games. Now, they were going to be playing in the playoffs if they won a game against Middlesbrough. They were going to be playing in the playoffs to go up to the Premier League, so that’s a big deal for a football club. It’s worth about 250, 200 million pounds, something like that.

It’s a lot of money and obviously a really big deal. This is the biggest game of some of the players’ lives. Southampton obviously thought the thing to do was to go and spy on some of the clubs they were playing in, in order to get them up there, so they could kind of learn what they were doing in training, but sadly they were caught.

So, this bloke was caught literally standing behind a tree with a camera, filming at Middlesbrough training ground, and he was caught by the Borough media team, who questioned him, and he then deleted footage off his camera. And then, and this is the detail that I really loved, he ran into the clubhouse, changed his clothes, and then ran away, basically. So, this is proper kind of spy stuff.

TL: Kind of gave it away at that point. “I’m not doing anything.”

KH: It’s not great spying, is it, really? And some of the pictures. But I think what’s really interesting about it is that this is against the rules in football, right? You’re not allowed to do that within three days or something like that, I think. Yeah, you’re not allowed to spy on a rival, fair enough.

But people have done it before, and I think Leeds United did it in about 2019, and they got fined something like 200,000 pounds as a result. So, I guess Southampton were kind of expecting a rap on the knuckles and a fine. But Middlesbrough played a blinder, in a way, in terms of their PR.

So, they briefed the media on it. They released that photograph of the guy, who turned out to be an analyst intern for Southampton. They matched his image to somebody on the Saints website, so everyone knew who he was.

And they then said, “We want, you know, this is serious.. there are serious stakes here. This is a team that’s going to go up to the Premier League. This is not fair just to give them a rap on the knuckles.” So they lobbied for the EFL to give them the highest possible penalty, and as a result, the EFL blocked them from playing in that playoff.

So, they were effectively expelled from the playoffs. So that, you know, that’s a decision that has cost Southampton potentially, if they were going to go up, and they were tipped to be the favourites, around the kind of 200 million pound mark. And the fallout from that is just, you can imagine, it’s not just the money.

TL: It’s the fans, isn’t it?

KH: It’s the fans, but also the practical stuff. So, there were fans who had bought tickets to that game, had, you know, were coming up to London, it was going to be played at Wembley, so coming up to London, they had hotel bills. The fans’ association is, you know, in absolute fury about this.

So, I think we’re going to see lawsuits from the fans against the club. The players are bringing a lawsuit against the club because obviously it impacts their earnings and their potential earnings, plus all the things like sponsorships and all those kind of things that come with the Premier League. It’s a massive, massive deal. It’s a big amount of money that we’re talking about. This is where you really see that football is a business, not a game.

TL: And also, you know, there’s a level of embarrassment there as well, because I know that obviously opposition fans have been really sort of leaning into this and, you know, doing the binocular signs, and there’s been a lot of memes. And, you know, that is going to hit that sense of pride of the fans, and it might take a while to recover from that.

KH: But interestingly, because they were caught just ahead of the Middlesbrough game, obviously, that game went ahead and Southampton won it. But the Southampton fans were also doing that and bringing the binoculars, so they were kind of making light of it.

I don’t think they thought it was going to be that serious, and one of the Southampton players did the same thing to Middlesbrough as well. So, it was kind of.. they didn’t really take it that seriously. And now I think they’re all hugely regretting doing that, and it is now a real, serious, serious thing, and it potentially, well, I think almost certainly, will cost the manager his job as well.

TL: So, we talk about the embarrassment, and if we’re, you know, this is a crisis in that there may be loss of revenue and it may affect the club. How do you think the club can rebuild trust, and what might the strategic intent be for them?

KH: Well, I think trust is the thing that’s gone, isn’t it? It’s gone from the players, it’s gone from the fans, it’s gone from the football league, you know, the English Football League, potentially. I think it’s going to really, really come back to haunt them, and they admitted that they spied not just on that game, but on two others. So, three games in total.

Now, if they, you know, do we know whether they did it more than that? You know, maybe there’s more to come out. I don’t know. I think this is going to run and run.

So, I think what they’ve got to do is just come out and be really, really clear about, you know, apologising. They shouldn’t have done it. They’ve got to accept the punishment. It’s really, really harsh, and then I think how they handle the lawsuits is really going to be telling.

TL: And actually, the apology, because we often talk about the art of the apology. I know that William Marks from SE Newgate did an article on this and made the very important point that while the eventual apology from Chief Executive Phil Parsons was direct, as he said what happened was wrong, and that the supporters deserved better from the club, in the same breath Southampton branded the sanction “manifestly disproportionate” because they were losing it, yeah, and they’re appealing, which was dismissed.

And so, yeah, William Marks made the point that from a communications standpoint, this is a textbook trap because you cannot fully own a mistake while simultaneously arguing that the consequences are unfair.

KH: And that is, we’ve seen this so many times in our podcast, haven’t we, that there is the communications apology, and then there’s actually how people deal with the resulting lawsuits. It doesn’t necessarily fit what they say they mean, and I think that’s really, that’s really, really interesting.

So, I think it will be whether they just take this on the chin, and I think they’re going to have to. I mean, they were caught, you know, right? And whatever you think about the English Football League, that’s the decision that’s been made.

Ultimately, it made no difference to Middlesbrough. Middlesbrough lost to Hull City, so Hull is now being promoted. Do you now take that away from Hull City? I mean, how do you handle it? There’s no way out of this, other than Southampton just going, “We really, really messed up,” and to do much, much better next season.

TL: Yeah, I think they’re going to have to really own it. And something again that we do talk about in a crisis situation is looking at the culture. And you mentioned that this analyst was caught, but it was also important to note that he was an intern and there was pressure.

And perhaps something that I want to pick up on is that the independent disciplinary commission said: “We have concluded that there was, on the part of the respondent Southampton, a contrived and determined plan from the top down to gain a competitive advantage in competitions of real significance by deliberate attendance at opposition training grounds for the purpose of obtaining tactical and selection information.

“It involved far more than innocent activity and a particularly deplorable approach in its use of junior members of staff to conduct the clandestine observations at the direction of senior personnel.”

So that’s the bit that’s really concerning, that that’s a top-down culture issue. And one of the phrases, and it’s not my favourite phrase, but my God, it means so much, is that the fish rots from the head down. And what we’ve got here is a culture problem that perhaps needs to be examined in order to help with that long-term building of trust.

KH: I think it is unforgivable that you use a really junior person who potentially wants to build a career in this sport, potentially with that club. And I don’t think that’s, like, if this was business, then, you know, it would feel very, very different.

I think the manager is generally quite well liked by fans. Again, this may be my ignorance shining through, but that’s my understanding. But that’s not enough, is it? You’ve got to, as you say, you’ve got to be kind of squeaky clean, and you’ve got to not put pressure on junior people to do things that you know are against the rules.

I mean, there’ll be lots of conversations about, did he know it was against the rules because, you know, he’s German and the rules are different in Europe, but that’s not an excuse. You have to know the rules of the game you’re playing in, right? Whether you’re a business, whether you’re a football club, whether you’re a charity, you have to know what the rules are, and you have to abide by them, and not knowing isn’t an argument.

So, I totally, I totally agree with you. And ultimately, it’s going to be that poor analyst intern. It was his picture that was all over the national news. He’s going to get absolutely, you know, he’s going to get a horrible time from it, I think, and I think that’s awful. I really hope they’re supporting him.

TL: Yeah. Yeah, that hiding behind a tree picture is going to stay with them for a while.

KH: Yeah, and it was that picture, I think. So, what I think was really fascinating about this was the way that Middlesbrough just got onto that story so quickly. There was no opportunity for time to do anything other than to admit guilt because they were on that story.

They didn’t go, “Oh, what should we do? We need to, you know, we need to take this EFL quietly.” They went loud, they went to media, that picture was everywhere. There was really no alternative but for Southampton to admit guilt, and I think that’s really interesting. It was a really interesting attack by Middlesbrough.

TL: Well, let’s hope for the Saints and for your brother as well, that they can come back from this by eating some humble pie and maybe sort of changing the way they do things.

KH: Yeah, and I hope so for the fans because ultimately it’s the fans that have lost, isn’t it? As ever.

Outro

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