What does it take to fool spies? Sometimes it’s simple, but it takes understanding your adversary. When there is a lot at stake, such as at the World Cup tournament, spying among sports teams is almost expected.
The South Korean team tried something a little different when they realized that someone from the Swedish team was eyeing them with a telescope from a nearby home.
South Korean coach Shin Tae Young had his team members swap jerseys, this way the numbers worn by the players in the warm up games would not be the accurate numbers. Shin understood that spying was expected.
“You always want to know about the opponent,” Shin said. “That’s something that we do as part of the staff. I don’t think that that’s bad. We have to understand our opponents. So that’s part of the job that we do.”
Earlier, a member of the Swedish coaching staff tried to get into a closed Korean training session and was told to leave. He still wanted to gather as much information as he could so he decided to watch from a distance, getting into a house overlooking Korea’s training base in Austria to watch training sessions using a high power telescope and video camera.
Swedish coach Janne Anderson apologized for the incidents, but said “This is something small that has been turned into something much bigger because usually our information about our opponents comes from us watching them play matches.”
It was not a big deal to the Koreans, insisted Shin, who said such in-depth analysis of opponents was now the international norm. In any case, he had a ruse of his own to outfox the Swedes, making his players use different jersey numbers. “We switched them around because we didn’t want to show our opponents everything and to try and confuse them.
South Korean Coach Shin Tae Young
“They might know a few of our players but it is very difficult for Westerners to distinguish between Asians and that’s why we did that,” Shin said. “All coaches probably feel their opponents are always spying on them. I think it’s perfectly natural that we all try to get as much information on each other as we can.”
Businesses might learn something from Shin’s attitude. Your competition always wants to find out as much as they can about you and your activities. Sometimes they may overstep ethical boundaries, so you should always be prepared and plan regular pro-active countermeasures.