A few days before Imane Khelif became the centre of the world’s attention, the biggest controversy at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris involved a drone. On the eve of New Zealand’s first women’s football match, Rebekah Stott spotted the craft hovering over the team’s training session.
“We were just doing throw-ins, and I was waiting for Ali Riley to throw me the ball and I hear this noise,” Stott told Sam Mewis, the former American international, on her podcast The Women’s Game last year.
“I’m a bit of a drone enthusiast, I’ve got one myself, and so I hear this noise, and I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh … is that a Mavic Pro?’”
Quite aside from the fact that flying drones above people was illegal in France, Stott’s discovery unravelled one of the biggest scandals in women’s football history.
It turned out that the drone had been sent there by the Canadian national team, and that this was something they’d been doing for quite a while. Subsequent investigations by the Canadian media found that their junior and senior national teams, for both men and women, had been using drones as far back as 2016 to spy on opposition training sessions in a bid to gain insights on tactics and personnel.
Canada’s women were docked six points, hampering their bid to defend their Olympic title, and their coach Bev Priestman, one of her assistants and an analyst were all sent home. FIFA later banned the three of them from participating any football-related activity for a year – and ending any chance that Football Australia, who have long admired Priestman’s coaching, would approach her to become the next Matildas coach.
Canada’s former head coach, Bev Priestman, is now in charge of the Wellington Phoenix’s ALW team.Credit: AP
So when Wellington Phoenix appointed Priestman’s wife, Emma Humphries, a Kiwi, to head up the club’s academy, then announced that they would reveal the identity of the new head coach of their A-League Women’s team in July – which just happened to be when Priestman’s suspension was due to expire – all signs pointed to one thing.
On Wednesday, three days after the ban ended, the worst-kept secret in the game was confirmed: Priestman has signed a two-year deal with the Phoenix, becoming arguably the most credentialled coach in ALW history, and also the most contentious.
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