It was the morning of Thursday, 7 May.<\/p>\n
Middlesbrough were at their Rockliffe Park training base preparing for the game against Southampton 48 hours later.<\/p>\n
The spy – Southampton intern William Salt – is said to have parked at the golf club, then walked a couple of hundred yards down a road that leads to a raised area of ground.<\/p>\n
Sources told the BBC that Salt stood pointing his mobile at the training session, while wearing in-ear headphones.<\/p>\n
Middlesbrough staff believe he may have been live-streaming the session via a video call.<\/p>\n
A member of Middlesbrough’s staff approached, say BBC sources, but the person would not identify himself. He then quickly deleted some content on his phone before running into the golf club.<\/p>\n
He jogged into the toilets, changed his clothes and hurriedly left the site.<\/p>\n
Middlesbrough’s photographer took photos and matched him to a photo on the Southampton website. One of those pictures was subsequently made public.<\/p>\n
Boro were furious and quickly reported the incident to the EFL, which charged Southampton with breaking two regulations:<\/p>\n
EFL regulation 3.4, which requires clubs to act towards each other with the utmost good faith; and<\/p>\n
EFL regulation 127, which prohibits any club from observing, or attempting to observe, another club’s training session within 72 hours of a scheduled match between the two clubs.<\/p>\n
During the investigation, details emerged about the club watching training sessions involving Oxford and Ipswich, in addition to filming Middlesbrough as they prepared for the first leg of their play-off semi-final.<\/p>\n
Southampton did not win any of the three games – they lost 2-1 at Oxford, drew 2-2 at home to Ipswich and 0-0 at Boro.<\/p>\n
Salt has since been appointed to a permanent role at Saints in the club’s academy.<\/p>\n
Southampton told the BBC “he’s been through a time time”.<\/p>\n
“When your photo is put out to the public, that is something tough to deal with,” chief executive Phil Parsons told the BBC last month. <\/p>\n
“A lot of people probably underestimated how that could have impacted a young lad so we’ve got a job to make sure that he’s looked after in his early career. But he’s a talented boy as well. I get good feedback and he’s got a good role at the club.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It was the morning of Thursday, 7 May. Middlesbrough were at their Rockliffe Park training base preparing for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":924173,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[440],"tags":[49,48,561,82],"class_list":["post-924172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soccer","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/924172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=924172"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/924172\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/924173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=924172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=924172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=924172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}