Southampton are guilty of needless idiocy after £200m cock-up
SPYGATE: Saints have been expelled from the play-offs before Saturday’s final against Hull, with Middlesbrough taking their place, but, as Richard Jolly writes, the club are now set to deal with the stigma of being labelled as cheats for years to come
The club that wanted to know everything seemed to have missed one minor detail in their investigations. More than 12 hours after one of the more explosive announcements in EFL history , the main story on Southampton’s club website still concerned Ross Stewart’s call-up to Scotland’s World Cup squad. And ‘the Loch Ness Drogba’ will indeed be one of the best nicknames in the United States this summer.
A more immediate issue, however, was Southampton’s expulsion from the play-offs ; even the four-point deduction applied to next season’s Championship campaign felt a footnote. Southampton launched an immediate appeal ; should it fail, however, then this sorry episode will rank as one of the most expensive miscalculations in footballing history. Before being thrown out, Southampton were the favourites to beat Hull in Saturday’s play-off final.
Promotion could be worth £200m. Even put the morality of their amateurish antics to one side for a moment and this is the £200m cock-up. And to what benefit?
Southampton admitted multiple breaches of EFL regulations relating to spying on opponents – or, in the language of the rules, observing their training sessions within 72 hours of scheduled games. The matches in question were a 2-1 defeat to an Oxford team who would end up relegated, in which Southampton were terrible, a 2-2 draw with Ipswich and the stalemate in the first leg of the play-off semi-final against Middlesbrough. The common denominator is that Southampton won none of those matches.
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