October 4 – Liverpool may have hoped the £1 million paid to Manchester City in 2013 over allegations that the club’s scouts had been spying on the activity of their Manchester counterparts had been brushed away. While the Premier League has shown no investigative interest in the ‘spygate’ row, the FA has asked to see Man City’s evidence surrounding the hacking.
The report, in the Sunday Times, names two former Man City employees – Dave Fallows, now Liverpool’s head of recruitment, and Julian Ward, now the club’s loan pathways manager – as accessing the Man City database on the Scout7 system.
They gained entry to the online system using the log-in and password of Man City scout, Rob Newman, between June 2012 and February 2013.
That log-in enabled Liverpool to monitor which players Man City were tracking. Scout7 holds performance data and video on more than half a million players worldwide.
A report in the Times today says the FA is not calling their information request an investigation however it could lead to misconduct charges of “bringing the game into disrepute”.
Man City used computer fraud investigators to confirm that their database had been hacked and their investigation pointed towards Liverpool and the former City employees. The £1 million settlement was made with neither Liverpool or the accused individuals accepting any liability.
The impact of the database hack is unclear, though the Sunday Times suggested the Man City signings of Fernandinho for £36 million from Shakhtar Donetsk and Jesus Navas for £18 million from Seville were speeded up by City because they feared they could lose both signings.
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