Former Leeds United forward Kemar Roofe has spoken to BBC Radio Scotland’s Sacked in the Morning podcast about what is was like to experience “spygate” first-hand and if the players ever questioned just how then-boss Marcelo Bielsa knew so much.<\/b><\/p>\n
The English Football League punished Leeds in February 2019<\/a> after a member of Leeds’ staff was spotted outside Derby<\/a>‘s training ground the previous month, before the two sides were scheduled to face each other in a Championship match.<\/p>\n Bielsa admitted he had sent someone to watch every team they had played that season train and said he personally paid Leeds’ \u00a3200,000 fine.<\/a><\/p>\n “We asked that question to ourselves [how he knew so much about the opposition] but the things you don’t know, you just don’t know,” Roofe said.<\/p>\n “We’d never experienced this before so something like that didn’t even come into our heads that someone’s actually going to spy on other teams because it’s never happened before, so we just didn’t even expect it.<\/p>\n “But when it all came out in the end, we were like ‘ah, it makes sense now’ because he knew everything. He knew if a player wasn’t going to play, if he was going to play, he knew the shape and we honestly didn’t understand how.<\/p>\n “We knew he was smart so we just put it down to [that]. He knows all of his details, he’s watched loads of games but we didn’t really know that was the reason why.”<\/p>\n