The League Arbitration Panel was damning about Southampton’s conduct not only through the spying, but also because the club initially provided misleading information.
On 8 May, the club admitted that a member of staff was in Middlesbrough, but they claimed it was “a very junior member of the analysis department” and he “was not instructed by any members of senior club staff”.
Southampton added that “no footage was captured, transmitted, shared or analysed” and that “senior executives and first team manager have not endorsed this”.
This proved to be untrue when the English Football League requested all relevant emails, messages and telephone calls between members of the analysis team, plus relevant bank/credit card statements for the junior analyst intern and the club.
On 12 May, the club apologised for inaccuracies and admitted that the trip was, as the panel’s report describes, “carried out at the request of Mr Eckert”, that three videos had been sent and there had been discussions with the head coach on WhatsApp about the content.
On 17 May, the club were charged with spying on Oxford and Ipswich and unsuccessfully tried to prevent those being consolidated in the same hearing.
The League Arbitration Panel found that it was “clear beyond any doubt that Southampton intended to obtain a sporting advantage over their league rivals by cheating”.
Southampton lost to Oxford and drew with Ipswich and Middlesbrough.
Lord Pannick, representing Southampton, proposed that if no sporting advantage had been obtained – because Saints did not win – then it would be inappropriate and disproportionate to impose any sporting sanction.
This was rejected because “information from the observations had been passed to the senior coaching team at the club, and it had been used in preparation for those matches”.
While the commission accepted the club’s remorse, that mitigation was tempered by the initial misleading response to the Middlesbrough allegations.
It was also “unimpressed” by some of the club’s witnesses, including Eckert, who said they were unaware spying was against the regulations when it was clear the opposite was true.
At one stage, another analyst messaged the junior analyst intern and said: “I said all along I was never happy about it all & it wasn’t right but no one listened to me!”
Southampton placed particular reliance on a £200,000 fine given to Leeds United for spying on Derby in 2019, but the commission suggested that sanction was excessively lenient.
The commission, with the play-offs in mind, was “sensitive to the importance, prestige and potential financial value of that knock-out competition” and that meant a non-sporting sanction “would be at best ineffective, if not positively perverse”.
It added: “Public confidence in the integrity of sport… is paramount. Cheating undermines that confidence. Here, the Middlesbrough incident seriously violated the integrity of the play-off knock out competition.”
In a statement released on Monday, external, Southampton said they would “reflect carefully on the published reasons, review its internal processes and ensure that governance, oversight and decision-making procedures are strengthened as a result”.
Southampton added: “We accept that the club breached the relevant regulations, and we recognise that the disciplinary bodies were entitled to conclude that proof of sporting advantage was not necessary in order to establish a serious offence.”
But the club also criticised the composition of the independent disciplinary commission, saying: “What is harder to accept is that similar scrutiny does not appear to have been applied to the composition of the disciplinary panel itself, given the apparent historic and indirect connections of two panel members to Middlesbrough.”
David Winnie, head of sport at Gilson Gray LLP, played one game on loan at Middlesbrough in 1994. Winnie had denied any questions about his impartiality.
Another panellist, Lydia Banerjee, works for Littleton Chambers, which in 2018 was contracted for legal work by Middlesbrough.
