Bev Priestman, the Canada coach at the centre of the Olympics spying scandal

Bev Priestman’s dismissal from the Paris Olympics in the wake of the Canada spying scandal raises questions over the future — let alone the legacy — of a coach previously regarded as one of the most respected in the women’s international game.

In a press conference on Friday, the Canadian Olympic Committee (COC) chief executive David Shoemaker announced he has since learned of “previous drone use against opponents predating the Paris 2024 Olympic Games”, which also risks tainting one of Canada’s proudest modern-day sporting achievements.

Their gold medal at the Tokyo Games in 2021 was Canada’s first in women’s football and earned Priestman back-to-back nominations for the Best FIFA Coach of the Year award. There will be no third act any time soon: FIFA disciplinary proceedings have resulted in Priestman’s suspension from any soccer-related activity for one year. Canada assistant coach Jasmine Mander and the staff member who flew the drone, Joseph Lombardi, are also suspended from soccer for one year. FIFA has deducted six points from the team’s Olympic group-stage total. Canada have lodged an appeal against the points deduction but, either way, the chances of a second successive gold feel slim.

One irony is that the previous Olympics marked an upswing in Priestman’s reputation after what she described as “the lowest point of my career”, having been overlooked for the role of England manager.

Priestman had spent two-and-a-half years with England’s Lionesses as assistant to former manager Phil Neville, in the expectation it would culminate in an Olympics in 2020 (later delayed to 2021 because of the Covid-19 pandemic) and a home Euros a year later. Indeed, she had made the move to England from Canada — where she had worked in the youth setup for five years — with those tournaments in mind.

But when Neville left for Inter Miami in MLS, the English Football Association (FA) looked elsewhere. Her view was that Neville had primed her to take over, but the FA opted instead for the then-Netherlands head coach Sarina Wiegman, with the Norwegian World Cup winner Hege Riise as interim and Team GB head coach until Wiegman completed the Netherlands’ Olympic cycle.

Priestman felt “overlooked”, moving briefly to work as England Under-18s coach in preparation for the Under-17s World Cup, yearning for more without an obvious next step.

The global shutdown as a result of Covid compounded those feelings of disorientation, but it also provided the proving ground from which Priestman built the most compelling chapter of her career. She devoted the first few months of the pandemic to reinventing herself as a coach and buried herself in performance podcasts, training manuals and football autobiographies in preparation for whatever the next step would be. That, of course, was with the Canada women’s national team and a gold medal at the Tokyo Games.

As England under Riise proved uninspired and Team GB slumped out of the Olympics at the quarter-final stage, those back in Priestman’s home country dreamed of what might have been had they stuck with the person who Neville described as “one of the best female coaches in England”.

There were opportunities for Priestman to work with clubs, but a role with Canada was a better fit given their shared history.

She had long been considered a John Herdman protege, learning from the former Canada women’s coach as a technical assistant at the 2015 World Cup and the 2016 Rio Olympics. Herdman, who is now the head coach of Toronto FC, was Canada women’s head coach from 2011 to 2018 and head coach of the men’s team from 2018 to 2023. During these years, he was also involved in the development of youth soccer through Canada Soccer’s Excel Program, which sought to align the youth pathway through to the senior level.

Herdman has also been implicated in the use of drones during his time at Canada Soccer, including a 2021 incident in which the Honduran press reported that their men’s national team spotted a drone during a training session before a World Cup qualifier. Canada Soccer CEO Kevin Blue said in a press conference on Friday that he had concerns over “a potential long-term, deeply-embedded systemic culture” of surveillance of other teams across both the women’s and men’s national teams.

The Athletic has reported that Canada used a staffer to observe a United States men’s team training session ahead of a scrimmage in January 2021, according to multiple sources briefed on the situation, who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect their positions.

Priestman had a long history of coaching in Canada’s youth and senior team programs, including working as a technical assistant and an assistant coach under Herdman from 2013 to 2018. After Herdman switched to coach Canada’s men’s team at the beginning of 2018, Priestman joined Neville’s England staff.

Her deep connection to the game in Canada meant that when it came to the 2021 Olympics campaign, the players Priestman had first met as teenagers were now reaching their peak years. With them, she often used a refrain from Herdman’s time: “Change the colour of the medal.” Herdman was referring to Canada’s 2012 Olympic bronze; they won the same medal in 2016. That Priestman’s predecessor, Kenneth Heiner-Moller, oversaw a round-of-16 exit in the 2019 World Cup cemented the feeling they needed a way to take the next step.

Even Priestman’s wife, the former New Zealand footballer Emma Humphries, was sceptical that bronze would turn into gold. She told the FIFA website: “When Bev was going for the Canada job, I remember her telling me: ‘I’m going to go into that interview with the theme of changing the colour of the medal’. And, honestly, I turned to her and said: ‘Don’t be so stupid!’. I just saw how difficult it would be for that team. They hadn’t beaten anyone ranked in the top 10 in 15 games, so I feared Bev could be setting herself up to fail.”

Canada’s Olympic triumph included a 1-0 win over the USWNT — their first in 20 years — and two games that went to penalties.

“After the last World Cup, it was kind of, like, ‘ugh’, you know? Things just weren’t clicking,” said then-team captain Christine Sinclair in 2021 in a press conference immediately after Canada won the gold medal. “Bev has come in and just changed the attitude of this team.” Sinclair added that Priestman “had brought the things that we all learned under John, but brought her own flair to it”.

Priestman, though, never received a gold medal. “The coaches don’t actually get one,” she said in 2022. “It’s just the players. I didn’t think I minded that until I went and won one, and then you want one. People say, ‘You’ve won a gold medal. You went and landed on top of the podium’. What people talk about is all those moments — but I landed on top of the podium because I was at my lowest and I drove myself to be the best I could be.”

Priestman first met Herdman when she was a 12-year-old youth player in their mutual hometown of Consett, in County Durham, England. Herdman was coaching a youth training session and encouraged Priestman to pursue coaching. After Priestman graduated from Liverpool University in 2007 and worked at Everton, she followed Herdman to New Zealand, where he was head coach of the Ferns from 2006 to 2011. Priestman served in various development roles there from 2009 to 2013, working her way up from women’s development manager to head of football development. She met her wife there and the pair’s son, Jack, was born in Canada in 2018.

Reports linked Priestman with a return to her homeland in the build-up to the 2023 Women’s World Cup when a pay, funding and equity dispute between the Canadian federation and its players dominated the team’s preparations. She told the FIFA website in April this year that throughout that period she had been “worrying about things no other head coach in the world had to worry about”.

That ill-fated campaign included a 4-0 defeat by joint-hosts Australia as Canada went out at the group stage for the first time in 12 years.

Despite that 2023 performance, Canada Soccer renewed Priestman’s contract at the beginning of 2024, securing her services until after the 2027 World Cup. Until this Olympics, Priestman’s reputation had been as a young and energetic presence in the Canada setup and someone who has an affable way with the press.

Canada Soccer has not dismissed Priestman as of the publication of this article and its internal investigation into the matter is ongoing.

(Additional contributor: Steph Yang)

(Top photo: Brad Smith/ISI Photos/USSF/Getty Images for USSF)