Canada coach Bev Priestman during training at Avenger Park, Melbourne, Australia on July 30, 2023.Asanka Brendon Ratnayake/Reuters
As part of the defence filed by Canada Soccer to FIFA over the conduct of the women’s soccer team, there is a testimonial from the man who started it all.
Team analyst and drone pilot Joseph Lombardi tries to jump on a professional grenade that’s already gone off. He takes all the blame himself.
“At no point was I pressured, inquired, advised, or tasked with going to film the New Zealand Women’s Olympic team training session. This was a personal decision,” he writes.
This sounds unequivocal. Except that everything else in the document – particularly those materials supplied by Canada Soccer – shows that’s not true.
According to Canada Soccer’s own documents, the practice of spying was so entrenched that women’s head coach Bev Priestman felt free to write an e-mail to HR complaining about someone who refused to do it.
First on their list of qualms, the unidentified staffer wrote – “Morally.”
If so, they may have been the only one.
Elsewhere, in a specification made by Canada Soccer, there’s this – “[Spying] was a practice started by one person – [current Toronto FC and former Canadian women’s and men’s coach] John Herdman – and continued by Bev Priestman. It was not facilitated by the federation.”
On the one hand, Canada is saying this has been happening for as many as a dozen years or more. On the other, it’s promising in its defence that it will “seek to identify and eliminate any systemic ethical issues.”
Seek to identify? You have just identified. You’ve named names. If this were any other sort of inquiry, it’s time to wrap up and head to the bar.
If your whole defence is ‘We’re dirty as hell’, why bother filing any sort of appeal? Is it possible Canada Soccer, in its glorious ineptitude, did not realize FIFA would make these documents public?
The deeper you go into this ludicrous failure of oversight, the more apparent it is that the people running our sports establishment have a different definition of the truth than the rest of us.
For you or I, the truth is what happened. Not some cop-talk explanation about how no one “inquired” you to do something.
In Canada Soccer-land, the truth is whatever people outside the circle of trust have found out, and absolutely nothing else. It’s Priestman hiring a lawyer to moan about how much she’s done for the program “much of which will never be known or understood.”
That odd inclusion of “understood” is now starting to sound like a sneaky confession.
As it turns out, Lombardi was the only person in the whole set-up with much honour. He was willing to take the whole hit for his colleagues – including spending several nights in a French jail.
Everybody else has spent the time since wheedling, prevaricating and deflecting like it’s the new faster, higher, stronger.
At first, the problem seemed to be that too few people in the Canadian soccer set-up understood right from wrong. But that’s not it any more. They did. They just didn’t care. In her e-mail to a colleague about the annoying dissenter on her staff, Priestman referred to spying in the second instance as “scouting.”
“[It] can be the difference between winning and losing and all the top 10 teams do it,” she wrote.
This is a direct callback to something Canada Soccer CEO Kevin Blue said on a Zoom call five days ago, shortly after Priestman had been sent home.
“In my four months in the sport, one of my biggest takeaways I have is that … it’s part of the culture globally to employ tactics that might be in the ethical grey area to gain an edge.”
In fairness, Canada is on the globe.
Blue went on: “Behaviour in the ethical grey area is completely unacceptable to Canadians. It’s completely unacceptable to Canada Soccer and our organization and, frankly, to me personally.”
A day later, after being warned by FIFA, Blue’s organization submitted Priestman’s smoking-gun e-mail.
We are past the point of who knew what when. Are we still supposed to believe that a practice this normalized was a complete mystery to the players? It strains credulity.
It’s no longer, ‘Who knew?’ It’s, ‘Who didn’t?’ Once that’s where we’re at, we’re no longer talking about fixing a broken part. We’re talking about swapping out the whole machine.
If you’re in a position of authority, and you knew, you have to go. If you’re in a position of authority, and you didn’t, you still have to go.
If this cheating happened at other Olympics, right now is the time to say that. Then we can begin to discuss restitution. Medals earned dishonestly are of no use to Canada. They confer no glory, and therefore have no worth. They’re just hunks of metal.
This has never been about blurring the lines in soccer, which is what everyone up and down the ladder at Canada Soccer keeps trying to bring it back to. Like every sport, soccer is in there with love and war on the fairness scale.
The women’s team’s crime is blurring the lines at the Olympics. That’s why they make you take an oath at the beginning of the Games – “respecting and abiding by the rules that govern them.”
It should offend our collective dignity that the people who represent us on the world stage get to break the rules, and then run around trying their best to obfuscate the full extent of that rule breaking.
This is no longer even about sport. It’s about the creeping sense that no one in a position of power at a public institution in this country feels they owe their actual bosses – you – the truth.
Things go wrong. Badly, sometimes. That happens. But once they do, there are two kinds of reactions.
The first is what we’ve seen here – close the curtains, turn off all the lights and stop answering the door. Stay very still. If you wait long enough, maybe they’ll just go away.
And then there’s the right kind.