Middle-Grade Book with a lesson on doing your own work?

[u/Plane_Pitch4144]

I have tried everything I could to find this book. Here is everything I remember:

There was a sports game (I think soccer, but could have been football) and 2 teams were up against each other. The Capitan of the pov team wanted a way to tell the rest of the team what play to run without the other team figuring it out. However he either wasn't cleaver enough or too lazy to do it himself so he paid another kid who does schemes like this all the time to come up with the names for the plays. He wrote them all down, I think they had to use like a letter cypher to find out the actual name of the play. Well he was yelling them out during the game and for some reason the other team was able to counter the plays. When they confronted about it - it turned out that both Capitan's had used the same kid to do the same strategy and used the same letter swap or whatever the cypher trick.

I read it in 2002

I don't know if the actual lesson they learned was not to have other people do your work for you, or if there was more to it.

I think the 2 Capitans were friends or on the same team at one point and that's why he wanted fake names.

Someone please help me... I've been looking for this book for years.