"Canada's women's soccer team is beloved." Nancy McDonald is a reporter for the Globe. "There are one of the country's most successful teams. They meddled in three straight Olympics and brought home gold and Tokyo. That was the first time a Canadian soccer team has ever won a major international tournament." The team is part of an organization called "Canada Soccer." And over the years, its national women's program has changed the country's relationship with soccer, with its winning record and major stars like Christine Sinclair. "This women's team announced to the world that Canada was a major footballing nation." And then came this past summer's Paris Olympics. The team was looking to defend its Tokyo gold medal, but instead it got caught up in a spying scandal before games even started. A Canada soccer staffer flew a drone to spy on an opposing team's practice, and was arrested. The team's head coaches left the games as a result. "We found that the spying that happened in Paris was just the tip of the iceberg, that spying was an ingrained part of the program." Globe reporter Greg Mercer started to look into what was happening with this team. "And it was also a symptom of much broader problems within the national team, particularly on the women's side, that allowed this to happen under an environment of winning at all costs." Nancy, Greg and Simon helped, who cover sports media for the Globe, have spent the last four months looking into Canada soccer. Today, Nancy and Greg explain how Canada's much-loved soccer team wound up in the middle of an international embarrassment. And what else was raising flags at Canada Soccer? I'm Maina Karaman-Welms, and this is the decibel from the Globe and Mail. Nancy, Greg, thank you so much for being here. "Hey, glad to be here." "Thanks for having us." To start, can you tell me how you went about investigating Canada Soccer, and specifically I guess the women's national team? Sure, so I spoke with a little over 60 sources. A couple dozen of them were with the national program, these are players and coaches. Getting them to open up was tough. I had to go back to them again and again, you know, some of them five or six times, provide the assurances that we will safeguard their anonymity. They were really scared. It was pretty grueling work. Yeah, I think we really had to go out of our way to reassure people that their identities would remain confidential when they're doing that. They were worried about professional repercussions. Soccer at the highest level in this country is a pretty close circle. A lot of folks shared with us that speaking out about the problems they saw inside Canada Soccer could be career limiting. We spoke with a number of people who had signed confidentiality agreements with Canada Soccer, and this restricts their ability to speak with us. One thing we kept hearing over and over again from people was speaking with you would be career suicide, even anonymously. The world of high level soccer in Canada is very small. It's very clear who's speaking out. So the risks are very real. Canada Soccer controls the sport at every level in this country, and they're very well aware of them. We can't report stories like these without the help of brave people who come to us as sources. So we have a real duty of care here to make sure that they don't face any harm for speaking up. So, Greg, I'll ask you, what did these sources tell you about what their experience was like to work for the women's national team? They painted a picture of a program that had a lot of dysfunction. They're talking particularly about the time after bev policeman became head coach of the women's team in 2020, and they say not long after the team won gold in Tokyo, the culture around the team really began to change, and in some cases people felt that it was becoming a toxic place to work. It got to the point where there were these pre-match drinking sessions called match day minus one. Staff told us that they were mandatory, they were expected to go, and this wasn't just having a drink or two. In some cases, people told us that this was drinking to excess. They felt that there was harassment, some of it's sexual. There were comments about people's sexual orientation and a lot of questions that people were not comfortable with. And just to be clear, these parties, these were not the team, like the players themselves. The staff of the team. No, these are staff and trainers and coaches. They say this was part of a culture where absolute loyalty was demanded, that you did not question the senior coaches, and that as part of this, this sort of win-it-all-cost approach, you did whatever you were told if you wanted to keep your job. How unusual is it for staff to have to attend mandatory socials the night before a match? Is this something that's fairly common? He spoke with people who had coached under John Herdmann, and they told us that, no, this is not part of the program. He was the previous coach before Beth Priestman. That's right. So this was absolutely not done then. This is something that was introduced by Beth Priestman and Jasmine Mander. We found examples where coaches were having these parties just hours before their team kicked off in the morning, so no, we got the sense this is very unusual. Did anyone, I guess, report these events, allegations of harassment to the leadership at Canada Soccer? Yes, we spoke with a couple of people who did speak up, and this actually led to a formal investigation. Yeah, that's right. In the spring of 2023, these concerns were coming to a head, so Canada Soccer went out and they commissioned an HR firm called Embark to look into some of the concerns coming out of these staff socials, as well as some of what people felt was harassing behavior by the senior coaches in the women's program. It wasn't just questions or comments that made people uncomfortable. Multiple people told us that at least in one instance, they had sex toys thrown at them in the room where these socials were happening. Okay, so what ended up happening with this investigation? Well, it was unfortunately compromised, it didn't get to finish its job, because somehow lawyers for Bev Priestman were able to get copies of confidential interviews that staff were making to the investigator with Embark. You can appreciate that that compromises people's feeling of trust, and the allegation is once the head coach knew who on her staff was saying what above her and complaining, she began to single them up. Wow, and so as a result, what happened with the investigation? That investigation essentially was not completed, but the problems continued, and so Candace soccer had to bring in a new investigator, an Ottawa lawyer named Aaron Durant. She was hired later that spring in May of 2023, essentially brought in to finish the job, and she began interviewing staff again. We know this from people who spoke with her, and she filed a report that documented their concerns about drinking, about the culture on the team, about workplace toxicity, and they also included references to people being forced to spy, and that was included in her report that was shared with Candace soccer. Okay, so this is interesting, so these other allegations, and it sounds like the spying kind of came out as a result of the investigation into these other things, so who was this delivered to, who saw this report? That's one of the tricky questions that we tried to answer with this story. They did mention unnamed executives who received it, and then they said essentially what those executives did, did not meet their standards in terms of reporting these kind of documents to the board. They say it was not shared formally with their board of directors. We do know that the chief executive at the time was Jason DeVos, and he's confirmed to us that he received a copy of this report, and he said he took it seriously and began to make changes as a result. Okay, so that was 2023, Greg, and then we have this third report into Candace soccer and the spying, and this is the one that people generally know more about, because it happened after the Paris Olympics this past summer, so what did this third report find? This third report essentially confirmed what staff had been saying more than a year prior to the Olympics, that allegedly, Bev Priestman and Jasmine Mander were directing staff to spy on opponents during their closed practices ahead of their games against the Canadians. So I just want to understand this here, Greg, when does the report allege that the spying practices actually started? So the allegation is the spying practice began many years before Bev Priestman was ever head coach that it predated her and went back to the time of John Hurtman. He had been coach of the women's team since 2011, Candace soccer in its own submissions to FIFA, the international governing body for the sport says it began under him. It didn't give a lot of specifics or a lot of details in that allegation, but in our own reporting, we heard about allegations of specific spying incidents dating from 2016 onward. So certainly many years before Bev Priestman was a part of the program, this was happening. Can we talk about some of those examples, I guess, like Nancy, what were staff allegedly asked to do when it comes to this? Well, certainly they were asked to put up drones above training sessions of their opponents, but not all of it was drones. We heard examples of people hiding in bushes to watch training sessions. One example of someone who dressed up like a tennis player at the IMG Academy in Florida. We heard one example of a person climbing up onto a rooftop to try to watch an opponent's training session. I wonder, because we talked briefly about the gold that this women's team won in Tokyo. That was such a big moment for Canada for this team. Did any of these reports find that spying was used to help Canada win that gold medal? So the Reimbogan specifically looked at that question. This is the third report, yeah. That's right. The one that was just completed and delivered in November. What she found is that there's no evidence that spying occurred in Tokyo. She says it was because of COVID protocols during those games specifically that prevented moving around outside of competition time. So she said she didn't find evidence of it and she likely said it's because of the COVID protocols in Tokyo at that time. So we know there were allegations of spying that came out in that second report, the one from summer 2023. Do we know if there was spying happening after that? So we know that spying definitely continued. Only weeks after that second report by Aaron Durant was delivered to Canada Soccer that documented concern spying was happening. We found evidence that at the World Cup, the spying continued for the women's program. We saw text messages from Joey Lombardi. He was the person arrested in Paris by French police for flying that drone over New Zealand. A full year before he's arrested, we have evidence that he was trying to do the same thing, the spy on the Australians. This is weeks after that Aaron Durant report identified this very thing that coaches were directing people like him to spy. So it continued. And then months later, we know that by March of 2024, that analysts were protesting internally, saying they're being asked by a bit of a policeman to continue spying. One of them, and we know this because Canada Soccer shared documents with FIFA after the Paris scandal. This show that in March of 24, before the Olympics, an analyst named Morgan Drew, he pushed back and said, "I don't want to do this. I don't want to spy anymore." And Bev Priestman, the head coach was so taken aback, she actually forwarded it to HR and said, "What can I do about this?" So that just shows how ingrained the spying was and the expectation that people would follow orders when they're told to spy. Nancy, I guess I'm wondering if, is this a real exception? We've been hearing when we were covering this in the summer about how the spying was kind of common practice in elite soccer. Is that the case? What did you find? I think one of the most interesting parts to come out of the reporting for me was there's this widespread perception that everybody does it. But no, we spoke with at least five coaches who've coached for Canada, and they've also coached internationally on further professional clubs, and they said, "No, spying is not part of the game," and certainly not what Canada was doing, this systemic approach to spying even at World Cups, even at Olympic tournaments. They said, "This is not at all normal." One coach said to us, "It defeats the entire purpose and joy of coaching." We had a number of analysts quit the program because they refused to cheat in this way, which is pretty good evidence that this is not normal. We'll be right back. So, at the center of the story are two women, Bev Priestman, the head coach of the team, and Jasmine Mander, the assistant coach. Nancy, let's start with Ms. Priestman. Can you tell us a little bit about her? Ms. Priestman grew up in the town of Consut in the northeast of England, where football is essentially religion. As a kid, she met and trained under John Hurdman, a legendary coach, who also happens to come from Consut. After university, she followed Mr. Hurdman initially in New Zealand, where he coached the women's team, and eventually to Canada, when he took over as head coach of the women's team here. When Mr. Hurdman took over as head coach of the men's team, she left Canada briefly. She worked as number two for the English women's team, the lionesses, and then she was lured back to Canada in 2020, just ahead of the Tokyo Olympics, to take over as head coach of the women's program here. And as we mentioned, that's where they won that gold medal. So, let me ask you now about Jasmine Mander, assistant coach to Bev Priestman. What do we know about her? Jasmine Mander grew up in B.C.'s lower mainland. As a girl, she played for the White Cats Elite program, which is the top youth program in B.C. She was heavily recruited as a teenager, eventually chose to play at UBC, which is probably the country's top soccer school. She had a rough start there. After her rookie season, she was suspended from the program and asked not to return. A confidential document prepared by UBC coaching staff that we were able to obtain listed alleged behavior, that included a negative attitude, resistance to participating in team activities and training, and creating divisions within the team. Now, after that season, a new coach took over, and under this coach, Ms. Mander was able to return and was eventually made captain, and that team did go on to win a national championship. Ms. Mander had a couple injuries. She blew out her knee pretty seriously, and I spoke with a number of her former teammates and coaches who said it hindered her game. She wasn't quite as fast going forward, and at the same time, she started to get really interested in coaching, so she started coaching with a youth program, and then she remained with the White Cats Academy and started coaching there. What we heard was the White Cats and Canada Soccer are quite closely linked, especially on the women's side, and coaches at the White Cats were promoting her to Canada Soccer. She moved up the ranks at Canada Soccer very quickly. She was being aggressively promoted, and she climbed the ranks from analysts to assistant coach very quickly. It's worth noting that Bev Priestman, as the head coach of the women's program, had the power to pick and choose who she surrounded herself with, and so I think she singled Jasmine Mander out as someone that she wanted as her right-hand person as she worked her way through the program. Okay, so we've talked about Bev Priestman and Jasmine Mander. What have they said about these allegations? We put all these allegations directly to both of them through their lawyers. Neither of them responded specifically to any of the allegations contained in the story. They, through their lawyers, did say some of these allegations were either inaccurate or even fabricated, but they repeatedly declined to say specifically what they were referring to. I will say Bev Priestman for the first time in four months after the Paris Olympics did make a public statement through Instagram. She essentially said she hopes this is a turning point for the game, and she hopes that it can clean itself up and set there have been some dark days for her since the scandal unfolded, but she did not acknowledge any of the allegations or her role in the spying. Her lawyer also added to that saying that she had hoped this would be a turning point for the game and said her client, Ms. Priestman, is being scapegoated essentially, and then she did say that some of these allegations that are coming out are, in her words, a direct attempt to discredit a gay woman in professional sports. Those were her words. I guess I'm wondering about Canada's soccer itself now. What is the organization saying about this situation and what it'll do to fix this? They essentially say this was allowed to happen under a previous culture that was simply unacceptable, and they say many of the people involved in these decisions are no longer with the program. They say they're making changes to gain back Canadians' trust and confidence. They receive a lot of money from the Canadian public about a third of Canada's soccer's revenues, either through user fees or through grants or federal funding, comes from the Canadian public. They have begun to change some policies around reporting unethical behavior. Going forward, if you see a coach at Canada's soccer that is engaging in spying, there's now going to be a mechanism to report that confidentially without it affecting your job. That didn't exist before, and I think that prevented a lot of staff from speaking up. They say they're going to introduce mandatory ethics training, and they're also going to improve governance training for the people who in oversight roles, like their executives and their board of directors. Okay. When it comes to the Brisbane and Jasmine Mander, what is their relationship with Canada's soccer now? They've been suspended by FIFA and Canada's soccer since July. Canada's soccer has said since the Sonja Regan Bowdoin report came out, and while it didn't name them specifically, it's pretty clear who the report is. Talking about Canada's soccer says they will not return to the organization. The last person I want to ask you about is Mr. Hurdman, who is alleged to have actually started these spying practices when he was in power at the organization. What do we know there, Greg? Well, John Hurdman did not participate in the Sonja Regan Bowdoin report. The way the lawyer framed it was that they could not find time in his schedule in the past four months to have a conversation. We should remind people that after the Paris spying scandal broke, John Hurdman did tell reporters that he was, quote, "highly confident that in my time as a head coach out in the Olympic Games or World Cup, we've never been involved in any of those activities," end quote. And at the time, he pledged to participate in the third party investigation. Before we enter it, Nancy, can we talk about the impact this scandal has had on the players? Because we haven't actually really addressed that yet. What have you heard from your sources? Well, we found no evidence that players saw any of the drone footage, and this is something that Sonja Regan Bowdoin also said. One of the more heartbreaking conversations I had was with a Tokyo medalist who talked about the impact all of this has had on her. She said, "You know, she gets razzed. She plays for a professional team. Every time a drone goes up, she gets razzed by her teammates like, "Oh, that must be yours." She said, "That I can take. That's no problem. That's to be expected. It gets old. But whatever." But she said, "You know, she has trouble even looking at that medal." She says, "You know, we never saw the footage, of course," but she felt that they did benefit. And this was a decision taken from them by their coaching staff. And so she's got a lot of anger toward these former coaches of hers. She said, "You know, from the time she was five years old, she worked every day toward that goal." You know, and it was taken from her, and she's just gutted by that. Yeah. Just very lastly, I just want to ask both of you, where does Canada Soccer go from here? How can it, you know, repair the damage that's been done to its reputation and also the trust that it's lost with fans and just the wider soccer community? I think it's going to take time. I mean, I think that's part of the shame of this whole story is that attitude, that everyone is doing this, which we heard often in reporting the story, was used frequently to justify or to look the other way when spying and cheating was happening within the program. So I think Canada Soccer now has to show the rest of the world. That's to show Canadians that it's serious about cracking down on this stuff. I do think the proof's going to be in the pudding. And I think Canada Soccer knows that people are watching now. I mean, from my perspective, I hope they look internally as well. You know, we spoke with a number of people who allegedly faced bullying and harassment. You know, people who were reduced to tears, who had panic attacks, they said. There's a lot of pain and a lot of damage that was done. It's not just about reputational harm, but they look at what was done to their coaching staff and staff and try to fix it. Nancy, Greg, thank you both so much for taking the time to be here. Thanks for having us. Thank you. On Friday evening, John Hurdman, the head coach of Toronto FC and former coach of the Women's National Team, resigned. Mr. Hurdman had only been with Toronto's Major League Soccer Team for a little over a year. In a statement issued by the club, Mr. Hurdman said he had, quote, "made the difficult decision that it's the right time for me to step away from the club as the organisation defines its vision for the future," end quote. Also, the globe has not heard from Joey Lombardi, the person arrested in Paris, despite attempts to reach him for comment. That's it for today. I'm Manica Ramen-Welms. Our producers are Madeleine White, Michal Stein and Ali Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow. (clicking) [BLANK_AUDIO]
An investigation by The Globe and Mail found that spying was an ingrained part of the celebrated women’s national team rocked by scandal at the Paris Olympics. But the revelation of a spying program uncovered many other problems inside the Canada Soccer organization.
Globe reporters Nancy Macdonald and Greg Mercer explain what their investigation found, how the scandal has affected players and what Canada Soccer is doing to address allegations.
