A ruling by the FIFA Appeals Committee puts former Canada coach John Herdman at Ground Zero within Canada Soccer for spying on rival teams. Herdman stands on the sideline during a semifinal match of the women's Olympic soccer tournament against Germany in Belo Horizonte, Brazil on Aug. 16, 2016.Eugenio Savio/The Associated Press
When John Herdman took over the Canadian national women’s soccer program in 2011, it was in shambles.
The women had finished dead last at the World Cup that year. Canada was in the process of wasting the youth of one of the world’s great players, Christine Sinclair.
Thirteen years, three Olympic medals and a lot of good press later, Mr. Herdman – who hasn’t coached the team in ages – has now returned it to shambles.
If, as Canada Soccer has claimed to FIFA, the spying program “was started by one person – John Herdman,” then this is on him.
He didn’t fly drones in France. He didn’t oversee people who did it. He didn’t write e-mails asking how to corral errant staffers who refused to take part in it. But he would have created the culture in which all of that could happen.
A basic sense of fairness suggests you don’t get to light a fire and then walk off as the house burns, but that’s what’s happening.
After a decade in the Canadian public sector, Mr. Herdman has gone into private soccer practice with Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment.
Asked about the scandal by reporters in Toronto before his name had been dropped into it, Mr. Herdman played coy. He described the news as “surprising” and “a shock.”
He didn’t look shocked. If anything, he looked mildly amused.
“I’m highly confident that in my time as a head coach at an Olympic Games or a World Cup, we’ve never been involved in any of those activities,” Mr. Herdman said.
One was left with the impression that Mr. Herdman was not surprised by what had happened, but that it had happened so foolishly. At an Olympics? Who’s that careless?
By Wednesday, his old bosses had wedged him under the wheels of FIFA’s big bus, and Mr. Herdman’s expansiveness had disappeared.
Now MLSE was doing the talking for him, via a canned statement: “To maintain the integrity of Canada Soccer’s independent review, Toronto FC head coach John Herdman will refrain from any further comment until the review has been completed.”
I love this line about the “integrity” of investigations. It’s de rigueur, and makes no sense. Why would this process depend on total secrecy? That’s not for its good, but for your good.
Also, using that word allows you to sneak in the impression of probity where it may not belong.
Thus far, Mr. Herdman has shown little interest in defending the program he built. He also hasn’t mounted much fight on behalf of his protégé, Bev Priestman.
Ms. Priestman is a professional dead woman walking. Canada Soccer didn’t even bother trying to appeal her one-year suspension. What does that tell you?
Coaches are fired for far less. And while there’s no need to sympathize with her – she seemed happy to let others dangle to save herself – you do feel some empathy.
Ms. Priestman’s already retaught us Cardinal Richelieu’s lesson – “Never write a letter, and never destroy one.”
Unless someone else was also foolish enough to lay out the conspiracy in an e-mail, it’s going to be easy to pin all of this on her. Easy doesn’t make it right.
If this happened the way Canada Soccer claims, it wasn’t her idea. She was taught to do it by her predecessor. After seven years under Mr. Herdman, the entire program and everyone in it would have been acclimated to his ideas.
If Ms. Priestman’s career is functionally over, why is Mr. Herdman still working?
Obviously, Canada Soccer has no power over MLSE. But what’s the country’s premier sports concern’s angle in this?
There is a world in which you can see this spinning out for weeks and months, even more disastrously than it has here in Paris.
What if Canada cheated in Tokyo in 2021? That’s been reported by TSN. What then? How can we keep that gold medal?
What if the team cheated in the lead-up to Rio 2016, where it won bronze? Or London 2012, where it won the medal that made the Canadians famous?
You can’t maintain a state of heightened alertness for more than a short while. Who else was got lazy and started writing texts and emails they shouldn’t have? They will be found.
On the balance of probabilities, it seems likely that Mr. Herdman authored a program that could become the biggest sporting embarrassment in this country since, well, the last one.
MLSE is a part of the country, isn’t it? Every chance it gets it’s waving the flag. It is always droning on about how the Raptors are Canada’s team. ‘We the North’ and so on.
If it turned out the coach of the Maple Leafs lit a fuse that threatened to explode the Canadian men’s hockey team right after an Olympics, MLSE would not be issuing carefully worded statements. It would be strapping him to a rocket on the top of Scotiabank Arena and asking around for matches. No one man is worth more than MLSE’s image as a Canadian institution.
Though Toronto FC is the runt of the MLSE litter, the same thinking should apply.
There should be an investigatory process. Until it is completed – and in order to spur it along – Mr. Herdman should either categorically deny that he has ever spied on opponents, or he should be suspended from his duties until it is.
MLSE – a company that makes its money in Canada from Canadians – should ensure that.
Neither Mr. Herdman nor MLSE responded to a request for comment on this column.
You may reasonably think this scandal is small beer. That everybody cheats, so why is it such a big deal when we do it? Or how bad can it be?
It’s fine to think that way. But then let’s dispense with the grand talk every two years about the glory of sport, and how much the Olympics expresses our national values. Let those words never escape the mouths of another politician or sports executive.
If that’s the case, let’s call sports what it is – a distraction from the banality of existence. No different than heavy drinking and online shopping.
If, on the other hand, you want sport to represent something meaningful, it falls to organizations like MLSE to ensure that all those whom they employ in a position of authority embody that word they love using so much – integrity.