Man City officials are "thought to have brought in espionage experts to investigate the security breach of their online performance analysis system," according to Steve Bates of the London DAILY MIRROR. Man City has made a "shocking discovery" that its worldwide scouting database could have been hacked by an employee of a rival Premier League club, which "will rock football to its core." Man City believes its online Scout7 performance analysis system -- holding detailed scouting reports of every player they have targeted at home and around the globe -- "has been infiltrated." Man City Sporting Dir and former Barcelona official Txiki Begiristain, who is coordinating the club’s summer transfer strategy, "is known to be highly disturbed by the breach and is being kept informed." So, too, is CEO Ferran Soriano. Although Man City was "unwilling to comment until their investigations are complete," a Premier League chief scout said, "The scouting industry as a whole is a fairly small one. That means of course that clubs do sometimes know which players are being checked out and by which clubs. Having someone else -- especially a rival -- access that information and see which players you are looking at, which players you may buy and which ones are being monitored over a defined period would be seen as catastrophic" (DAILY MIRROR, 6/15).
